Daniel Varon

Harvard University , United States

• Conference: Methane
• Presentation: Quantifying methane emissions from individual coal mine vents with GHGSat-D satellite observations
• Presentation Time: Thursday

Biography:

I am a graduate student in the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group (ACMG) at Harvard. I’m interested in using satellite observations to estimate emissions of greenhouse gases. I focus on using fine-resolution satellite observations of atmospheric methane to quantify emissions from individual point sources.

Short description about presentation:

GHGSat-D was launched in June 2016 as a demonstration instrument for the planned GHGSat satellite constellation, which aims to quantify emissions from individual methane point sources using fine-resolution (< 50 m) observations of methane plumes. GHGSat-D has much coarser precision (~13%) than is planned for the constellation (1-5%), but we show that it can still detect plumes from individual coal mine vents after time averaging of wind-rotated observations on successive overpasses. We present observations for the San Juan (United States), Camden (Australia), and Bulianta (China) coal mines and deduce the corresponding emissions with error estimates using integrated mass enhancement (IME) and cross-sectional flux methods.