How satellite-based observations help us monitor greenhouse gas emissions

AVENGERS Webinar
4 December 2025, 15:00 CET
To join the webinar, register here

Speakers:
Hartmut Bösch, University of Bremen
Dominik Brunner, Empa

SCIAMACHY (2002–2012) was the first satellite to systematically observe total columns of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) in the short-wave infrared (SWIR) region of the solar spectrum. Since then, impressive progress has been made in monitoring CO2 and CH₄ from space. Today, a whole suite of satellites with complementary capabilities is orbiting the Earth, ranging from high-resolution point source imagers targeting individual sources to satellites with lower resolution but covering the globe in a single day. Improved retrieval methods and spectroscopy have also greatly enhanced the quality of observations, while advanced atmospheric transport models and other tools can now link variability in observed CO₂ and CH₄ columns to individual sources and sinks, and quantify emissions.

In this webinar, the speakers will share their insights into the current state of CO₂ and CH₄ satellite observations and their usefulness for quantifying emissions.

In the first part, the main methods used for satellite remote sensing of CO₂ and CH₄ will be introduced, focusing on dedicated GHG instruments designed to provide global coverage. The presentation will show examples of how data from GOSAT and TROPOMI instrument have been used to study regional-scale CH₄ fluxes from tropical wetlands and identify and quantify major CH₄ emission hotspots. TROPOMI observations can be complemented by observations from hyperspectral imagers that achieve meter-scale spatial resolution, albeit with lower retrieval precision; an example will illustrate how these sensors enable detailed mapping of emission plumes and the identification of relatively modest emission sources over Europe. Finally, an outlook will be given on the upcoming Copernicus CO2M mission, which will routinely map CO₂ and CH₄ globally at a resolution sufficient to detect and quantify emission hotspots such as power plants, cities, and landfills.

The second part will focus on using atmospheric transport models in conjunction with inverse methods to quantify emissions from satellite observations, demonstrating the potential of satellite observations and the challenges involved in quantifying emissions at different scales. Three different application examples will be presented: an Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) examining the ability of the forthcoming CO2M satellites to measure CO2 emissions from power stations and urban areas; the assimilation of CO₂ observations from the OCO-2 satellite to quantify anthropogenic emissions and the natural exchange of CO₂ with the biosphere over Europe; and the assimilation of CH₄ observations from TROPOMI to quantify methane emissions over Romania, a country with significant emissions from the oil and gas sector and landfills.

Hartmut Bösch is a professor at the Institute of Environmental Physics at the University of Bremen, where he leads the Department of Physics and Chemistry of the Atmosphere. Before joining the University of Bremen in 2022, he held research positions at the University of Leicester and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research focuses on using remote sensing observations of greenhouse gases from ground-based, airborne, and satellite instruments to study surface–atmosphere fluxes.

Dominik Brunner leads the Atmospheric Modelling and Remote Sensing group at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science (Empa) and is a professor at the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich. A key research topic of his group is to combine ground-based and satellite observations with atmospheric transport models to quantify the emissions from individual sources, cities, or countries.

Organized by:
The Horizon Europe projects AVENGERS, EYE-CLIMA and PARIS