About
What is the
Integrated Methane Inversion?
The Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI)
is a user-friendly research-grade cloud-computing tool for estimating total methane emissions for any domain and period of interest
by analytical inversion of satellite observations from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). It enables researchers and stakeholders
toinfer methane emissions at up to 0.25° × 0.3125° (≈ 25 × 25 km²) spatial resolution and up to weekly temporal resolution from
TROPOMI satellite data resident on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, without requiring
expert knowledge of inverse methods or cumbersome data download.
The IMI uses the GEOS-Chem 3-D chemical transport model
driven by NASA Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) meteorological data as a forward model for the inversion. It uses
cutting-edge algorithms developed by the Harvard Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group (ACMG)
in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and documented extensively in the peer-reviewed research
literature.
It is strongly documented and fully open-code to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and integrity of the results.
An IMI preview feature allows the users to display the satellite observations for their domain and period of interest along
with prior emission inventories, point source data, and expected information to be achieved from the inversion.
Integral Earth, a new simple web interface under development, allows non-experts to access the IMI with no learning curve. Leave it to the experts at Harvard to set up and conduct your inversion, and receive complete results with full transparency of methods used.
