Gas Flaring and Air over Oil Fields
Every flare that burns over the oil fields, seen night after night from space, with the nitrogen dioxide in the air above them, for any month since 2012.
Iraq burns more of the gas that comes up with its oil than almost any other country. This tool reads the VIIRS thermal anomalies of every day of a chosen month at 375 m, counts how many days each pixel was hot, and keeps as gas flares the hot spots that burned on a chosen share of the days, which separates them from passing crop and reed fires. Neighbouring flare pixels are grouped into sites with their position, nearest known field and number of days burning. The daily OMI images of tropospheric nitrogen dioxide of the month are turned back into values with their published colour map and averaged, and the air above the flares is compared with the whole region. Maps, a table, GeoJSON and CSV are exported.
Overview
Flaring wastes energy that could power homes and pollutes the air of Basra, Maysan and Kirkuk with soot, nitrogen oxides and other combustion products. Satellites see every flare, every night, whatever the official figures say.
Comparing months and years shows whether flaring is falling as gas-capture projects come on line, and where it is not.
What you enter · What you get
What you enter
- An oil region from the list, found by name or drawn (up to 160 km)
- Year and month (from 2012)
- Share of days that makes a flare
- Nitrogen dioxide on or off
What you get
- Map of flares coloured by days burning
- Table of flare sites with nearest field
- Monthly nitrogen dioxide map
- NO₂ over the flares and over the region
- GeoJSON of flares and CSV
How it works in the field
Method and equations
Flares
VIIRS 375 m active fire and thermal anomaly detections (Suomi NPP before 2018, NOAA-20 from 2018), day and night, from NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services. For each pixel the number of days with a detection is counted; a flare is a pixel detected on at least 15, 25 or 40 % of the days read. Flare pixels that touch are grouped into one site, located at their detection-weighted centre.
Nitrogen dioxide
OMI tropospheric NO₂ column (molecules per cm²) of every day of the month; each colour is turned back into its value with the published colour map (191 classes of about 1×10¹⁴), and pixels with at least three valid days are averaged.
Accuracy and error limits
- VIIRS at 375 m detects flares down to a few square metres of flame, at night better than by day; a pixel may hold several flares, and a large flare can light two pixels. Persistence identifies flares reliably in oil fields; elsewhere kilns, refineries, steel mills and power plants also burn continuously. OMI pixels are about 13 × 24 km at best and its data have gaps from the row anomaly, so the NO₂ map is regional.
- What is not covered: the volume of gas burned (it needs radiant heat, which is not read here), methane and soot, cloudy days, and flares smaller or cooler than the detection limit. Images are read as rendered colours, so values are those of the colour classes.
- To reduce the error: use 25 % or more for oil fields, compare the same month across years, check sites with high-resolution imagery, and for emissions use the published VIIRS Nightfire flare volumes of the Earth Observation Group and the World Bank Global Gas Flaring Tracker.
Who uses it
Standards and references
- Schroeder, W., Oliva, P., Giglio, L. & Csiszar, I. A. (2014). The New VIIRS 375 m active fire detection data product: algorithm description and initial assessment. Remote Sensing of Environment, 143, 85–96.
- Elvidge, C. D., Zhizhin, M., Baugh, K., Hsu, F.-C. & Ghosh, T. (2016). Methods for global survey of natural gas flaring from Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite data. Energies, 9(1), 14.
- Levelt, P. F. et al. (2006). The Ozone Monitoring Instrument. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 44(5), 1093–1101.
- Lamsal, L. N. et al. (2021). Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) Aura nitrogen dioxide standard product version 4.0. Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, 14, 455–479.
- World Bank (2024). Global Gas Flaring Tracker Report.
- NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), Earthdata.
At a glance
- Category
- Atmosphere & air quality
- Runs on
- Phone, tablet and desktop browser
- Export
- Flare and NO₂ maps as PNG, JPG and PDF; flare sites as GeoJSON and CSV; full PDF report
- Access
- Free
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