A team from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Heidelberg University has used the German environmental satellite EnMAP to simultaneously detect CO₂ and NO₂ in power plant emission plumes at a spatial resolution of just 30 metres.
In 2022, industrial and power plant emissions accounted for around 55% of global CO₂ and 38% of NOₓ emissions. Monitoring these emissions is essential for evaluating international climate goals, such as the Paris Agreement, and this breakthrough will allow highly precise monitoring of industrial emissions from space.
Satellite-based measurements offer an independent way to monitor emissions, but until now, most instruments lacked the spatial resolution needed to pinpoint specific sources like power plants. High background CO₂ levels and atmospheric interference further complicated detection. Because they are released together, NO₂ is often used to estimate CO₂ emissions but no previous instrument could capture both gases simultaneously at high resolution.
The new method overcomes this limitation by using EnMAP (Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program), a satellite originally intended for land surface observation. Although it has relatively low spectral resolution, its spatial detail of 30 x 30 metres allows for accurate tracking of both gases directly above emission sources. This enables calculation of NO₂/CO₂ ratios, offering clues about plant technology, efficiency, and operations. In the future, CO₂ emissions could potentially be inferred from NO₂ data alone.
Christian Borger, first author of the study and, until recently, a postdoctoral researcher in the Satellite Remote Sensing Group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry said: ‘Using the EnMAP data, we were able to determine the distribution of CO2 and NO2 in emission plumes from individual power plants – for example, from plants in Saudi Arabia and in the South African Highveld region, one of the world’s largest emission hotspots.’
Additionally, the study provides fresh insight into the transformation of NO to NO₂ within plumes – a key atmospheric process previously studied only via aircraft. EnMAP’s data now opens up global, consistent, and comparative monitoring of industrial pollution, demonstrating that atmospheric gas detection is possible even with satellites not originally designed for this purpose.
Group leader Thomas Wagner concludes: ‘Our study shows how satellites with high spatial resolution can contribute to the targeted monitoring of industrial emissions in the future – in addition to large-scale missions such as the European CO2M satellite.’
The full research can be read here.
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