Many countries have committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, through agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the Global Methane Pledge. To enforce these, it is essential to see where greenhouse gases come from.
When emissions are made transparent, countries and companies will have the confidence that complying with the rules won’t give them an unfair disadvantage. Moreover, companies can fix potential leaks once they know where they are.
SRON develops instrumentation for satellites that scan the entire Earth’s atmosphere on a daily basis, for methane and other gases. Sentinel-5p has been active in space since 2017 and its successor METOP-SG A will be launched in 2025. Every week, our scientists publish a world map of all major methane sources. That data goes to the United Nations, who subsequently alert the responsible governments and companies about their emissions, and to the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service.
Our engineers are also working on space instrumentation that detects CO2. From 2027 onwards, the TANGO satellite constellation zooms in on individual emitters with 300×300-metre ground pixels and measures their CO2 and methane emissions. In contrast, the CO2M satellite has a wide field of view and will scan the entire Earth’s atmosphere for CO2, among other gases, every four days from 2027 onwards.
We also remain committed to continuously improving our detection technologies and processing satellite data more efficiently. This will allow us to provide the proper authorities with even better information.
