A Spectral Analysis-Based Approach for Methane Emission Estimations Using Landsat and Sentinel-2 Data

Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere after carbon dioxide. Oil and gas industries represent one of the main sources of anthropological methane emissions. This is particularly noticeable in sporadic releases during maintenance operations or equipment failures. In this work, a spectral analysis-based approach is used for detecting and quantifying methane emissions utilizing two types of multispectral remote sensing data, namely Landsat and Sentinel-2 images. The investigation was carried out on an oil and gas installation located in the South of Algeria. These experiments reveal close similarities and a good agreement between the obtained results, in terms of detection and quantification of methane emissions, using Landsat data and those achieved through Sentinel-2 images. This constitutes a good indicator of the used spectral analysis-based approach reliability.