MethaneSET: Unified Multi-Sensor Datasets for Satellite-Based Methane Plume Detection

Authors: Cesar Aybar, Julio Contreras, David Montero, Miguel D. Mahecha, Luis Gómez-Chova

Paper: Scientific Data (under review)

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 over one million WRF-LES enhancements enables physics-based data augmentation. All datasets follow the TACO specification and are distributed as Parquet catalogs with Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs.

Dataset	Samples	Size	Datacard
methaneset-s2-pretraining	57,291	37.2 GB	view
methaneset-s2-finetune	3,612	13.6 GB	view
methaneset-l89-pretraining	21,926	8.88 GB	view
methaneset-l89-finetune	1,548	0.78 GB	view
methaneset-emit	503	652 GB	view
methaneset-bank	1,064,448	31.5 GB	view

Tutorials

Notebook	Description
	Multispectral plume detection (Sentinel-2 / Landsat-8/9)
	Hyperspectral plume detection (EMIT)

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{\'o}mez-Chova, Luis},
  journal = {Scientific Data},
  year    = {2026}
}