September 9, 2022, Friday, 03:00PM (GMT+03.00, Moscow) at IKI RAS, room 200

Abstract:

Since 1970s, hotspot monitoring has been one of the main directions of research in multispectral remote sensing of the Earth surface. Amongst other high temperature sources, gas flares installed at oil and gas related facilities have been distinguished as persistent sources with the highest temperatures measured. Over time, several methods have been developed to detect and characterize them, with one of them been VIIRS Nightfire (VNF) algorithm based on nighttime hotspot detection primarily in SWIR. This algorithm provides radiant heat estimates of the observed hotspot, as well as flaring volumes estimates for observed gas flares. VNF data has been collected since April, 2012 up to present.

While the global instrumental estimate of flared volumes has been the main purpose of VIIRS Nightfire, a new direction of emergency monitoring is emerging with each flare unique dataset being collected over time. Such data may contain surges (or outages) in detected flaring corresponding to emergencies or changes in the production mode of the facility.

In this report, several examples of ‘historical’ (spanning over 2012 to 2021), as well as actual (as of August, 2022), emergencies or production mode changes are discussed. For example, an emergency fire at Bulla-Deniz field (Azerbaijan, 17 August–22 October, 2013), fire at the oil terminal in Matanzas, Cuba (6–12 August, 2022), or a new large gas flare at the LNG facility neighboring Nord Stream pipeline compressor station (17, June, 2022 – present) datasets are presented and analyzed, along with several other cases.

In this presentation, VIIRS Nightfire data is used, along with the popular natural NASA designed fires detector MODIS and VIIRS Applications Related Active Fire Product.