Attribution of individual methane and carbon dioxide emission sources using EMIT observations from space

Carbon dioxide and methane emissions are the two primary anthropogenic climate-forcing agents and an important source of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. Uncertainties are further magnified when emissions occur at fine spatial scales (<1 km), making attribution challenging. We present the first observations from NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) imaging spectrometer showing quantification and attribution of fine-scale methane (0.3 to 73 tonnes CH(4) hour(−1)) and carbon dioxide sources (1571 to 3511 tonnes CO(2) hour(−1)) spanning the oil and gas, waste, and energy sectors. For selected countries observed during the first 30 days of EMIT operations, methane emissions varied at a regional scale, with the largest total emissions observed for Turkmenistan (731 ± 148 tonnes CH(4) hour(−1)). These results highlight the contributions of current and planned point source imagers in closing global carbon budgets.