Meteorological Drivers of Permian Basin Methane Anomalies Derived from TROPOMI

Abstract

The launch of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on the Sentinel-5 Precursor (S-5P) satellite has revolutionized pollution observations from space. The purpose of this study was to link spatiotemporal variations in TROPOMI methane (CH4) columns to meteorological flow patterns over the Permian Basin, the largest oil and second-largest natural gas producing region in the United States. Over a two-year period (1 December 2018–1 December 2020), the largest average CH4 enhancements were observed near and to the north and west of the primary emission regions. Four case study periods—two with moderate westerly winds associated with passing weather disturbances (8–15 March 2019 and 1 April–10 May 2019) and two other periods dominated by high pressure and low wind speeds (16–23 March 2019 and 24 September–9 October 2020)—were analyzed to better understand meteorological drivers of the variability in CH4. Meteorological observations and analyses combined with TROPOMI observations suggest that weakened transport out of the Basin during low wind speed periods contributes to CH4 enhancements throughout the Basin, while valley and slope flows may explain the observed western expansion of the Permian Basin CH4 anomaly.

COVID-19 impact on the oil and gas industry emissions: a case study of methane and nitrogen dioxide in the Permian basin

“…Lyon et al, (2021) analyzed the variation of CH4 concentrations from airborne and tower measurements, highlighting a declining in methane concentrations from 176 Mg CH4 hr -1 before the lockdown to 55 Mg CH4 hr -1 between April and May 2020 in a defined area on the East of Delaware basin. Observations done in this research and the observations in Lyon et al, (2021) can be linked to the results from Crosman (2021), who describes the meteorological drivers which contribute to a western CH4 enhancement anomaly in the Permian basin (which can be observed in Figure 3). If we reduce the study area to the one described by Lyon et al, (2021), we can interpret the impact of the COVID-19 as a decrease in CH4 but, if we increase the area, enhancements of CH4 can be observed towards the west of Delaware.…”

NO2 pollution decrease in big cities of Latin America during COVID-19 pandemic

“…L3 data set was downloaded from the Google Earth Engine (GEE) Javascript API and with a resolution of 0.01° × 0.01° as a result of the oversampling of the L2 OFFL NO 2 data from TROPOMI by GEE [51, 52, 40]. The conversion to L3 is done by the harpconvert tool using the bin spatial operation.…”

Source characterization of volatile organic compounds at Carlsbad Caverns National Park

“…Therefore, prevailing winds at the site were southeasterly, with occasional gusts from the northwest (Figure S2). When the summer monsoon transport is weak, the site can be more strongly impacted by local and terrain-driven flows, with southeasterly daytime upslope flows and nocturnal northeasterly downslope flows (Crosman 2021). During the summer of 2019, the site was impacted by a subtropical ridge over southern New Mexico, which suppressed the monsoon transport out of the Permian Basin to the west (Figure S1) and led to more frequent northwesterly winds at CAVE (Figure S2).…”