NIWA’s Post

Measuring methane from the ground, air and space. 🛩️ Why did NIWA researchers fit out a Cessna 185 with specialist methane-measuring equipment and fly back and forth across Canterbury recently? Tracking methane emissions is a bit like finding a leak. If it’s a fire hydrant gushing water, it’s easy to spot. But if it’s a damp patch in your garden from a slow hose leak, you need more precise tools to track where the water is coming from. That’s what NIWA researchers are doing with methane in the atmosphere. MethaneSAT, a satellite designed to detect large-scale emissions from oil and gas operations, is great at spotting these big ‘fire hydrant’ leaks. But agricultural emissions are more like that slow underground leak – dispersed and harder to pinpoint. As part of the MethaneSAT agricultural research programme, led by NIWA with funding administered by MBIE Science and Innovation, the researchers were measuring methane in the atmosphere across Canterbury to help validate the satellite’s observations as it passed overhead. 🛰️ As well as measuring methane from the Cessna, the successful field campaign involved measuring methane from the ground via four high-tech instruments called EM27/SUN spectrometers. Methane is an important greenhouse gas contributing to climate change and is responsible for almost half of New Zealand’s emissions. Validating the satellite’s accuracy for a country like New Zealand, where we already have excellent information about our methane emissions, means the data can be relied on in countries where emissions profiles are less well known. Ultimately this will help to identify hot spots for methane emissions and help focus global efforts to reduce these. 🌏 Thanks to the University of Wollongong, Australia and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) for the loan of additional spectrometers. 📸 Stuart Mackay