Methods for Global Survey of Natural Gas Flaring from Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Data
By Christopher D. Elvidge, M. Zhizhin, Kimberly E. Baugh, F. Hsu, Tilottama Ghosh. 2015
371 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A set of methods are presented for the global survey of natural gas flaring using data collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The accuracy of the flared gas volume estimates is rated at ±9.5%. VIIRS is particularly well suited for detecting and measuring the radiant emissions from gas flares through the collection of shortwave and near-infrared data at night, recording the peak radiant emissions from flares. In 2012, a total of 7467 individual flare sites were identified. The total flared gas volume is estimated at 143 (±13.6) billion cubic meters (BCM), corresponding to 3.5% of global production. While the USA has the largest number of flares, Russia leads in terms of flared gas volume. Ninety percent of the flared gas volume was found in upstream production areas, 8% at refineries and 2% at liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals. The results confirm that the bulk of natural gas flaring occurs in upstream production areas. VIIRS data can provide site-specific tracking of natural gas flaring for use in evaluating efforts to reduce and eliminate routine flaring.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cedacd4e743477c820a4646beebdb4f3d7722fec
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- VIIRS night-time lights (2017, methodology): “A method was developed in 2014 to detect and filter out lightning (Elvidge et al. 2015).”
- Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing of Nighttime Light Observations: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives (2019, methodology): “Due to the lack of established calibration sites for DMSP-OLS [208], such relationships were built by manually selecting stable regions as references [87,175,186,209,210] or automatically identifying stable pixels as pseudo-invariant features [208,211].”