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GHGSat specializes in high-resolution remote sensing of greenhouse gases from space. The GHGSat methane concentration and emissions data products were evaluated under NASA's Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) program. GHGSat currently has a constellation of small satellites (SmallSats) that are capable of measuring methane emissions from point sources as small as landfills and individual oil and gas wells.

GHGSat satellites typically have a spatial resolution of 25 m (>50 m for GHGSat-D) and the Field of View (FOV) of approximately 12 km x 12 km of these datasets allow gas plumes emitted from industrial sources to be captured and distinguished from the surrounding background concentrations, constituting a differential measurement. The reflectance and abundance products can be combined into a high readability "Concentration Map" for human interpretation. The abundance datasets from multiple observations of a given site can be combined to form a monitoring product for semi-automatic detection of emitter activity or large changes in emission rates using pre-determined thresholds. Abundance datasets also allow emission rates to be estimated for individual sources. Plume dispersion is modeled using site information and weather data from global meteorological models or local weather stations and matched to the measured datasets.

The GHGSat Inc. data evaluation is complete, and the data acquired during the evaluation are available via the SmallSat Data Explorer tool (SDX). The completed GHGSat Evaluation Report and the Quality Assessment Summary will be posted here when available for release.

Authorized Data Use and Users

All members of the U.S. Government and researchers funded by the U.S. Government have access to GHGSat data for scientific use. All data requests must be approved by CSDA.

End User License Agreement

USG EULA

Obtaining Data

  • To request access to CSDA data offerings, complete the CSDA Authorization form. The CSDA team will verify if the user is authorized for data access. Once verified, the user will be notified
  • Search for GHGSat data using the CSDA SmallSat Data Explorer (SDX)
  • Download direct from the SDX (Earthdata login required) or use the Bulk Download Tool

Copyright

Data products and derivatives for imagery must contain the following copyright markings (YYYY is the year of the image acquisition):

  • For data products: “© GHGSat Inc YYYY. All rights reserved.”
  • For derivatives: “Includes copyrighted material of GHGSat All rights reserved.”
  • A joint copyright notice may be used as appropriate

As a courtesy, GHGSat requests an opportunity to review in advance and provide feedback on scientific and technical articles and publications that will include GHGSat data.

Authorized users should send CSDA a courtesy copy of any publications that include CSDA-provided data.

CSDA Acknowledgment

To help CSDA identify your publications, we request that you include the following acknowledgment when publishing work created using these data:

"This work utilized data made available through the NASA Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) program."