AI that automatically detects methane plumes from space could be a powerful tool in combating climate change.

In combination, these new sensors will provide global hyperspectral coverage, enabling worldwide automated detection of methane plumes. Until now, however, there have been only very few methods to readily map methane plumes from aerial imagery and the processing step is highly time-consuming. A new machine-learning tool developed by Oxford researchers overcomes these issues by detecting methane plumes in data from hyperspectral satellites. The paper ‘Semantic Segmentation of Methane Plumes with Hyperspectral Machine Learning Models’ has been published in Nature Scientific Reports. * The model has an F1 score of 81.96 points (out of possible 100) for detecting large methane plumes.