Technological Maturity of Aircraft-Based Methane Sensing for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

Methane is a major contributor to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Identifying large sources of methane, particularly from the oil and gas sectors, will be essential for mitigating climate change. Aircraft-based methane sensing platforms can rapidly detect and quantify methane point-source emissions across large geographic regions, and play an increasingly important role in industrial methane management and greenhouse gas inventory. We independently evaluate the performance of five major methane-sensing aircraft platforms: Carbon Mapper, GHGSat-AV, Insight M, MethaneAIR, and Scientific Aviation. Over a 6 week period, we released metered gas for over 700 single-blind measurements across all five platforms to evaluate their ability to detect and quantify emissions that range from 1 to over 1,500 kg(CH₄)/h. Aircraft consistently quantified releases above 10 kg(CH₄)/h, and GHGSat-AV and Insight M detected emissions below 5 kg(CH₄)/h. Fully blinded quantification estimates for platforms using downward-facing imaging spectrometers have parity slopes ranging from 0.76 to 1.13, with R² values of 0.61 to 0.93; the platform using continuous air sampling has a parity slope of 0.5 (R² = 0.93). Results demonstrate that aircraft-based methane sensing has matured since previous studies and is ready for an increasingly important role in environmental policy and regulation.