Carbon Mapper Launches New Data Portal – Unlocking New Insights and Accessibility

Carbon Mapper is thrilled to announce the launch of our updated data portal and our first set of developer APIs. The revamped data portal gives users new insights into regional and sector-specific emissions, better functionality, and overall easier navigation and use. This supports a core element of our mission: making data accessible and actionable to help drive methane and carbon dioxide emission reductions.The new portal delivers average emission rates for methane point sources—enabling stakeholders and decision makers to see emissions trending over time and providing the ability to demonstrate and verify emission reduction efforts.  Another exciting update includes summary statistics by region and sector, providing quick insight into the relative sectoral contributions of high emission methane sources.

Read more about new features and key offerings below, or check out a portal walkthrough.

Key updates and improvements

We’ve ramped up overall data portal capabilities. New elements include the following:

• Emission point sources — plumes are now assigned to individual emission sources, which are specific facilities or equipment on the earth’s surface that emit greenhouse gasses. This helps users identify specific point sources and track emissions at these locations over time
• New interface — fresh design and user-friendly interface for improved user experience and navigational ease. Features include more comprehensive basemaps, flexible search filters, time series charts, and more.
• Enhanced search — supports searches across different features such as date, sector, emission rate, plume numbers, and persistence (frequency of observed emissions).
• New data overlays — in addition to our plume images, users can now view raw methane concentrations and surface imagery captured simultaneously during our observations, which provides increased transparency of our data collection methods.
• Coverage maps — see where observations were conducted to provide better insights on which areas have been observed and where we have and haven’t detected plumes.
• Summary statistics — an experimental feature that provides an initial look at total methane point source emissions by sector (oil and gas, coal, landfills, electric, etc.) and geographic region. These statistics are expected to evolve as we dramatically increase our observations over the coming years. 

New: Carbon dioxide plumes

With the new data portal, we’re also excited to make carbon dioxide (CO₂) point source plumes at large industrial facilities visible for the first time! This extends our capabilities beyond methane to address the other major carbon molecule, CO₂ — a top priority for greenhouse gas mitigation. Adding large point source CO₂ observations with point source methane data will help to improve our emissions accounting for these sources and help identify root causes and opportunities that address both types of emissions. This brings us closer to our goal of monitoring high emission carbon point sources comprehensively, and we plan to add CO₂ emission estimates in a future update.

At Carbon Mapper, we’re on a mission to make point-source emissions visible globally to enable science-based action. Measuring the “big 2” carbon molecules (CH₄ and CO₂)  allows for greater impact as we work to get previously unavailable data into the hands of decision makers everywhere.

API and developer tools

Our initial public API endpoints now empower users to interact with our data programmatically, making it easier for developers and researchers to integrate it within their applications. This is critical to our goal of improving public access and uptake of global carbon emissions data. To access our API, please create an account in the data portal. Once registered, you can explore our comprehensive product guide and API reference.

More features coming soon

We’re eager to continue adding new features to our portal roadmap. Items coming in the first half of 2024 will include the following:

• User accounts — enables users to save searches, build source collections, and set up alerts and notifications for new data.
• Custom Areas of Interest (AOIs) — allows users to upload or draw custom areas to search data, set alerts, and generate aggregate emissions
• Curated lists — allows users to create lists like suggested sources and plumes based on proximity, plumes to watch, sector-based plumes, and more.
• CO₂ emission rates —  provides carbon dioxide emission rates in addition to plumes and images.

Observing methane and carbon dioxide data from space

The Carbon Mapper data portal offers multi-sensor data on high emission point sources of methane and CO₂ around the globe. Currently, our data portal includes over 10,000 methane plumes and over 700 CO₂ plumes observed by Carbon Mapper airborne surveys of key regions in Latin America, the US and Canada using NASA JPL’s AVRIS-NG and Arizona State University’s Global Airborne Observatory instruments, as well as global observations by NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) instrument onboard the International Space Station.

With the anticipated launch of our first Carbon Mapper Coalition satellites in 2024, we’re eager to further expand observations from space.

Questions

If you have questions or feedback about our data or portal features and functionality, please visit our Data Portal FAQs or email us at data@carbonmapper.org. 

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