Google and NASA JPL release an AI model that maps methane plumes worldwide

Google Research and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a vision-transformer model trained on 3.6 million simulated plumes that processes raw EMIT spectra from the ISS at 60 m resolution, detecting roughly 50% more methane plumes than human analysts and 23 000 additional sources, including 24 of the 25 largest-emitting landfills. The resulting plume database is freely available on Earth Engine, with the model hosted on Kaggle and code on GitHub, offering a higher-resolution alternative to the Sentinel-5P-based Copernicus methane hotspot explorer.