Spectrometric imaging of sub-hourly methane emission dynamics from coal mine ventilation

oleh: M Knapp, L Scheidweiler, F Külheim, R Kleinschek, J Necki, P Jagoda, A Butz

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: IOP Publishing 2023-01-01

Deskripsi

Anthropogenic methane (CH _4 ) emissions contribute significantly to the current radiative forcing driving climate change. Localized CH _4 sources such as occurring in the fossil fuel industry contribute a substantial share to the anthropogenic emission total. The temporal dynamics of such emissions is largely unresolved and unaccounted for when using atmospheric measurements by satellites, aircraft, and ground-based instruments to monitor emission rates and verify reported numbers. Here, we demonstrate the usage of a ground-based imaging spectrometer for quantifying the CH _4 emission dynamics of a ventilation facility of a coal mine in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, Poland. To this end, we deployed the imaging spectrometer at roughly 1 km distance from the facility and collected plume images of CH _4 column enhancements during the sunlit hours of four consecutive days in June 2022. Together with wind information from a co-deployed wind-lidar, we inferred CH _4 emission rates with roughly 1 min resolution. Daily average emission rates ranged between 1.39 ± 0.19 and 4.44 ± 0.76 tCH _4 h ^−1 , 10 min averages ranged between (min) 0.82 and (max) 5.83 tCH _4 h ^−1 , and puff-like events caused large variability on time scales below 15 min. Thus, to monitor CH _4 emissions from such sources, it requires measurement techniques such as the imaging spectrometer evaluated here that can capture emission dynamics on short time scales.