Toward a versatile spaceborne architecture for immediate monitoring of the global methane pledge

The global methane pledge paves a fresh, critical way toward carbonneutrality. However, it remains largely invisible and highly controversialdue to the fact that planet-scale and plant-level methane retrievals haverarely been coordinated. This has never been more essential within thenarrow window to reach the Paris target. Here we present a two-tieredspaceborne architecture to address this issue. Using this framework, wefocused on the United States, China, the Middle East, and North Africa, andsimultaneously uncovered methane-abundant regions and plumes. These includenew super-emitters, potential leakages, and unprecedented multiple plumes ina single source. More importantly, this framework is shown to challengeofficial emission reports that possibly mislead estimates from global,regional, and site scales, particularly by missing super-emitters. Ourresults show that, in principle, the above framework can be extended to bemulti-tiered by adding upcoming stereoscopic measurements and suitableartificial intelligence, and thus it is sufficiently versatile for immediateand future monitoring of the global methane pledge.