Paper
MethaneSET: unified multi-sensor datasets for satellite-based methane plume detection
Cesar Aybar · Julio Contreras · David Montero · Miguel D. Mahecha · Luis Gómez-Chova
Scientific Data · under review
Summary
Methane is the second-largest driver of anthropogenic warming, and a disproportionate share of emissions comes from a small number of super-emitters detectable by satellite. MethaneSET provides analysis-ready datasets for methane plume detection spanning three sensors, with expert-verified segmentation masks from two independent monitoring systems (IMEO MARS and Carbon Mapper).
For multispectral sensors (Sentinel-2, Landsat-8/9), labeled scenes with plume masks and confirmed plume-free references are provided for change-detection workflows. For the EMIT imaging spectrometer, calibrated radiance cubes and precomputed matched-filter products support both end-to-end and retrieval-based detection. A synthetic plume bank of 238,545 projected WRF-LES enhancements, plus the 1,647 raw simulation cubes it is built from, enables physics-based data augmentation. All datasets follow the TACO specification and are distributed as Parquet catalogs with Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs.
Citation
@article{aybar2026methaneset,
title = {MethaneSET: Unified Multi-Sensor Datasets for
Satellite-Based Methane Plume Detection},
author = {Aybar, Cesar and Contreras, Julio and Montero, David
and Mahecha, Miguel D. and G{'}omez-Chova, Luis},
journal = {Scientific Data},
year = {2026}
}