Continuous Weekly Monitoring of Regional Methane Emissions with TROPOMI Satellite Observations

Continuous weekly monitoring of methane emissions with satellite observations on regional and national scales can improve understanding of emission trends, track progress of mitigation efforts, and reveal new opportunities to cut emissions. We present an inverse modeling framework for weekly continuous monitoring of methane emissions at ~25-km resolution in user-selected source regions using TROPOMI satellite observations and the Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI v2.0). We apply this framework to quantify weekly methane emissions from the top six US oil and gas basins (Anadarko, Barnett, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Marcellus, Permian) for 2022–2023. We verify our inversion results against independent in-situ observations and flux analyses and investigate possible economic and activity drivers of observed trends in emissions, including the 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act with measures to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas production. We further apply our continuous weekly monitoring framework to quantify methane emissions across Turkmenistan from 2020 through 2023. We use the resulting emission record to evaluate operator mitigation efforts coordinated by Turkmen officials, US diplomats, and the International Methane Emissions Observatory.