When the wildfires in California raged in early January, the speed with which they overtook entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles shocked the world. Overnight, the wildfires jeopardized homes, people’s lives, and the critical infrastructure—roads, power systems, sewers, and more—that forms both the backbone of day-to-day life in the city and its economy.
Because the fires were moving so fast, it was difficult to determine what was happening on the ground. Which neighborhoods were most at risk? Was the infrastructure supplying the city sustaining damage from the flames?
Watching the disaster unfold from GHGSat’s headquarters in Montreal, we wanted to support local and state officials however possible. We knew that by putting our fleet of satellites on the case, we could help local officials get a clear and timely picture of what was happening on the ground.
Harnessing Satellites for Action
Roughly the size of a microwave oven, GHGSat’s satellites are designed to detect and quantify methane emissions—and most importantly, in this scenario, trace them to an area roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Because of the size of our constellation, we can revisit locations on a near-daily basis to monitor for emissions.
Typically, we employ our satellites to deliver data and insights about methane emissions to carbon-intensive industries and governments around the world. With these insights, operators can spot methane leaks swiftly, determining where they are coming from and how much methane was emitted, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards, and reducing the financial impact associated with lost product.
But for disaster response, the methane emissions that our satellites detect are a signal for something different: infrastructure damage. The presence of methane is a sign that a pipeline or other piece of energy infrastructure has sustained damage and no longer contains the product running within it.
For local authorities and first responders, this is vital information. Natural gas pipelines can run through neighborhoods—if those pipelines were damaged, lives could be at risk. Alongside the potential for danger to the people of Los Angeles, damage to gas infrastructure means that the safe and reliable transportation of energy across pipeline networks was in jeopardy, with potential for severe economic damage.
Drawing on our lessons learned from responding to emergencies like the 2023 Turkiye earthquake and the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline leak, we sprang into action.
Zooming in for Damage Assessments
The first step was to make sure we were looking in the right places for damage.
Unlike many other satellites, which take images of wide swaths of area, GHGSat’s runs in “target mode,” zooming in for close-up observations of specific facilities In a single observation, our satellites can look at an area of 100-270 square kilometers, because of the high resolution of the imagery, can trace the source of an emission down to 25 meters.
Gathering information from news updates, we built lists of areas to target, from the nearby natural gas infrastructure that might be impacted to the neighborhoods that were most at risk. Quickly, our team instructed our satellites to target those locations, looking at the Palisades and Altadena—the neighborhoods that were most affected—and blanketing downtown Los Angeles, in which there is extensive natural gas infrastructure. Once we had added the at-risk areas to our payload planner, which sequences our satellite observations, we leveraged the capability of our constellation to conduct frequent monitoring on a daily basis.
With limited cloud cover, we were able to capture nineteen observations and provide them in near-real time to local authorities. While the worst of the fires raged, GHGSAT kept its satellites trained on those locations, continually adjusting our satellite tasking decisions based on the path of the fires, so we could alert of any changes.
In a spot of welcome news among the devastating impacts of the fire, we were relieved that we did not detect any methane among the observations, confirming that critical energy infrastructure was relatively unscathed. This meant that officials could focus attention on other critical areas that needed disaster relief and support. Now that the smoke has cleared, estimates of the economic damage—not to mention the lives that were uprooted by the tragedy—indicate that expenses from the disaster will add up to between $250-275 billion.
Looking back on this experience, a few lessons learned stood out for our team.
First, satellites have a critical role to play in emergency response. Once thought of as pipe dreams or far-off technologies, it’s clear that satellites can provide vital information for fast-moving situations. They are particularly useful as they can also capture footage of places that first responders can’t even access due to safety risks.
Second, emissions data shed insights on more than the environment. They are a canary in the coal mine to assess infrastructure health. In emergency response, methane leaks point to damage; for more typical industry operations, detecting methane is a way of identifying potentially faulty assets.
More broadly, commercial space companies are a powerful way to augment emergency response services. Initiatives are underway to bring them into the fold. Programs like NASA CSDA have outsized impact, bringing commercial companies that have disrupted the space industry into the government fold. Disaster response is not yet tapping the commercial sector to its fullest extent.
