Satellite Methane Monitoring for Wastewater Treatment

01 — Overview

Overview

Short measurement campaigns provide only snapshots of fugitive methane emissions from wastewater treatment. This study investigates whether frequently available satellite imagery can reveal longer-term spatial and temporal patterns instead.

The analysis covers Sentinel-2 observations of a Calgary wastewater treatment plant from 2019 through 2023, providing a multi-year view of daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual variation.

02 — Contributions

Key Contributions

• 01

  Evaluates high-spatial-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery for long-term wastewater methane monitoring.

• 02

  Develops image-processing techniques for extracting spatial and temporal concentration patterns.

• 03

  Identifies candidate emission hotspots and compares them with ground-based measurements.

03 — Method

Method

The study processes multi-year Sentinel-2 imagery to retrieve methane column-concentration distributions over the plant. Digital image-processing steps aggregate and compare those distributions across daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual timescales and locate recurring spatial hotspots.

04 — Evaluation

Results

The recovered patterns show substantial spatial and temporal variation and identify hotspots consistent with ground observations. The paper presents satellite imagery as a cost-effective complement to continuous monitoring while noting limitations from clouds, atmospheric scattering, and sensor resolution.

05 — Reference

Citation

@Article{Mehrdad_2024_SatelliteMethane,
  author         = {Mehrdad, Seyed Mostafa and Zhang, Bo and Guo, Wenqi and Du, Shan and Du, Ke},
  title          = {First Investigation of Long-Term Methane Emissions from Wastewater Treatment Using Satellite Remote Sensing},
  journal        = {Remote Sensing},
  year           = {2024},
  volume         = {16},
  number         = {23},
  article-number = {4422},
  doi            = {10.3390/rs16234422}
}