WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A New Mexico startup has developed a method that uses artificial intelligence to automatically detect methane emissions on a global scale.
Geolabe, founded by Dr. Claudia Hulbert and Dr. Bertrand Rouet-Leduc in Los Alamos, is the winner of the Entrepreneurs Challenge instituted by the NASA Science Mission Directorate to identify innovative ideas and technologies from small business start-ups with the potential to advance the agency's science goals.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that significantly contributes to global warming, and this promising new technology could provide data to help decision makers develop strategies to mitigate climate change, according to NASA.
As global temperatures rise to record highs, the pressure to curb greenhouse gas emissions has intensified. methane is the second largest contributor to global warming, and is estimated to account for approximately a third of global warming. Moreover, because methane stays in the atmosphere for a shorter amount of time compared to CO2, curbing methane emissions is widely considered to be one of the fastest ways to slow down the rate of global warming.
However, monitoring methane emissions and determining their quantities has been challenging due to the limitations of existing detection methods.
The Geolabe team has developed a deep learning architecture that automatically identifies methane signatures in existing open-source spectral satellite data and deconvolves the signal from the noise. This AI method enables automatic detection of methane leaks at 200kg/hour and above, which account for more than 85 percent of the methane emissions in large oil and gas basins.
Information gained using this new technique could help inform efforts to mitigate methane emissions on Earth and automatically validate their effects, NASA says.
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