How public satellites from NASA, ESA, and JAXA are used to measure greenhouse-gas and air-quality emissions from orbit, and what that data is good for.
Overview
Satellite emissions monitoring uses spectrometers in low Earth orbit to measure trace-gas concentrations in the atmospheric column above an asset. Six active greenhouse-gas missions across NASA, ESA, and JAXA, paired with broader Earth-observation constellations, supply the raw measurements Floodlight uses to produce facility-level emission estimates without relying on self-reported activity data.
How It Works
Each mission carries a spectrometer tuned to the absorption lines of specific gases: TROPOMI on Sentinel-5P for NO2, CO, SO2, and CH4; OCO-2 and OCO-3 for CO2; the GOSAT lineage (GOSAT, GOSAT-2, GOSAT-GW) for CO2 and CH4. Floodlight ingests the public retrievals, traces each reading backward through 3D wind fields to its likely source, and applies a Bayesian inversion to convert column concentrations into facility-level emission rates. Every figure ships with a published margin of error.
Key Benefits
- •Independent of self-reported activity data
- •Facility-level attribution with published uncertainty on every estimate
- •Global coverage across NASA, ESA, and JAXA missions
- •Refresh on the satellite overpass cadence, typically days to weeks
- •Audit-ready provenance from raw radiance to delivered figure
Applications
Banks use the data for climate-VaR underwriting and regulatory stress testing. Corporates use it for Scope 1 disclosure that does not depend on self-reported inventories. Cities map emissions block-by-block to target the streets, sectors, and infrastructure that drive their citywide budget. Regulators use it as an independent check on bottom-up inventories.