Satellite Methane Monitoring for Wastewater Treatment

I. 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.

II. Key Contributions

• Evaluates high-spatial-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery for long-term wastewater methane monitoring.
• Develops image-processing techniques for extracting spatial and temporal concentration patterns.
• Identifies candidate emission hotspots and compares them with ground-based measurements.

III. Methodology

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.

IV. Main Findings

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.

@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}
}