Detecting Methane Plumes using PRISMA: Deep Learning Model and Data Augmentation

Abstract: The new generation of hyperspectral imagers, such as PRISMA, has improved significantly our detection capability of methane (CH4) plumes from space at high spatial resolution (30m). We present here a complete framework to identify CH4 plumes using images from the PRISMA satellite mission and a deep learning model able to detect plumes over large areas. To compensate for the relative scarcity of PRISMA images, we trained our model by transposing high resolution plumes from Sentinel-2 to PRISMA. Our methodology thus avoids computationally expensive synthetic plume generation from Large Eddy Simulations by generating a broad and realistic training database, and paves the way for large-scale detection of methane plumes using future hyperspectral sensors (EnMAP, EMIT, CarbonMapper).