Industrial emissions play a major role in the global methane budget. The Permian basin is thought to be responsible for almost half of the methane emissions from all U.S. oil- and gas-producing regions, but little is known about individual contributors, a prerequisite for mitigation. We use a new class of satellite measurements acquired during several days in 2019 and 2020 to perform the first regional-scale and high-resolution survey of methane sources in the Permian. We find an unexpectedly large number of extreme point sources (37 plumes with emission rates >500 kg hour⁻¹), which account for a range between 31 and 53% of the estimated emissions in the sampled area. Our analysis reveals that new facilities are major emitters in the area, often due to inefficient flaring operations (20% of detections). These results put current practices into question and are relevant to guide emission reduction efforts.

This article introduces the design and imaging principles of the Advanced Hyperspectral Imager (AHSI) aboard China's GaoFen-5 satellite. The AHSI is a visible and nearinfrared (VNIR)/short-wave infrared (SWIR) HSI. It is the first spaceborne hyperspectral sensor that utilizes both a convex-grating spectrophotometry and an improved three-concentric-mirror (Offner) configuration. It has 330 spectral bands, a 60-km swath width, and a 30-m spatial resolution. Various tests have been designed to evaluate its imaging performance, and the results indicate that the AHSI's performance is comparable to other spaceborne HSIs launched recently and those scheduled for launch in the next few years. The AHSI has the capability to detect and identify different ground objects.

Mapping different land cover types with satellite remote sensing data is significant for restoring and protecting natural resources and ecological services in coastal wetlands. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical classification framework (HCF) that implements two levels of classification scheme to identify different land cover types of coastal wetlands. The first level utilizes the designed decision tree to roughly group land covers into four rough classes and the second level combines multiple features (i.e., spectral feature, texture feature and geometric feature) of each class to distinguish different subtypes of land covers in each rough class. Two groups of classification experiments on Landsat and Sentinel multispectral data and China Gaofen (GF)-5 hyperspectral data are carried out in order to testify the classification behaviors of two famous coastal wetlands of China, that is, Yellow River Estuary and Yancheng coastal wetland. Experimental results on Landsat data show that the proposed HCF performs better than support vector machine and random forest in classifying land covers of coastal wetlands. Moreover, HCF is suitable for both multispectral data and hyperspectral data and the GF-5 data is superior to Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 multispectral data in obtaining fine classification results of coastal wetlands.

A novel Symmetric Sparse Representation (SSR) method has been presented to solve the band selection problem in hyperspectral imagery (HSI) classification. The method assumes that the selected bands and the original HSI bands are sparsely represented by each other, i.e., symmetrically represented. The method formulates band selection into a famous problem of archetypal analysis and selects the representative bands by finding the archetypes in the minimal convex hull containing the HSI band points (i.e., one band corresponds to a band point in the high-dimensional feature space). Without any other parameter tuning work except the size of band subset, the SSR optimizes the band selection program using the block-coordinate descent scheme. Four state-of-the-art methods are utilized to make comparisons with the SSR on the Indian Pines and PaviaU HSI datasets. Experimental results illustrate that SSR outperforms all four methods in classification accuracies (i.e., Average Classification Accuracy (ACA) and Overall Classification Accuracy (OCA)) and three quantitative evaluation results (i.e., Average Information Entropy (AIE), Average Correlation Coefficient (ACC) and Average Relative Entropy (ARE)), whereas it takes the second shortest computational time. Therefore, the proposed SSR is a good alternative method for band selection of HSI classification in realistic applications.

Infrared images have the advantages of being employed in all weather conditions and exhibiting strong anti-interference abilities and are widely used in many fields. However, there are also problems of low contrast, high noise and blurred details, for which a high dynamic infrared image enhancement method based on wavelet transform is proposed. First, multi-resolution analysis is performed using wavelet transform, and the image is decomposed into a low-frequency information layer and high-frequency information layer, which are processed separately. The low-frequency information layer is subjected to contrast-constrained adaptive histogram equalisation to improve the contrast. The high-frequency information layer is enhanced with adaptive coefficients, and the gain coefficients are determined using gamma transform, which is designed to increase the applicability. Wavelet inverse transform is performed on the processed image to meet the desired requirements. It is shown that the algorithm can effectively enhance the high dynamic image contrast and improve the image detail information.

Because of the complicated imaging conditions in space and the finite imaging systems on satellites, the resolution of remote sensing images is limited. The process of increasing an image’s resolution, image super-resolution, aims to obtain a clearer image. High-resolution (HR) images are affected by various input conditions, such as motion, imaging blur, down-sampling matrix, and various types of noise. Changes in these conditions seriously affect low-resolution (LR) images, so if the imaging process is a pathological problem, super-resolution reconstruction is a pathological anti-problem. To optimize the imaging quality of satellites without changing the optical system, we chose to reconstruct images acquired by satellites using deep learning. We changed the original super-resolution generative adversarial nets network, upgraded the generator’s network part to ResNet-50, and inserted an additional fully connected (FC) layer in the network of the discriminator part. We also modified the loss function by changing the weight of regularization loss from 2 × 10⁻⁸ to 2 × 10⁻⁹, aiming to preserve more detail. In addition, we carefully and specifically chose remote sensing images taken under low-light circumstances from GF-5 satellites to form a new dataset for training and validation. The test results proved that our method can obtain good results. The reconstruction peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) at the scaling factors of 2, 3, and 4 reached 32.6847, 31.8191, and 30.5095 dB, respectively, and the corresponding structural similarity (SSIM) reached 0.8962, 0.8434, and 0.8124. The super-resolution speed was also satisfactory, making real-time reconstruction more probable.