Dan Cusworth: Quantifying methane emissions from US Landfills

Abstract:

Methane emissions from solid waste may represent a significant fraction of the global anthropogenic budget, but few comprehensive studies exist to assess inventory assumptions. We quantified emissions at hundreds of large landfills across 18 states in the United States (U.S.) between 2016-2022 using airborne imaging spectrometers. Spanning 20% of open U.S. landfills, this represents the most systematic measurement-based study of methane point sources of the waste sector.  We detected significant point source emissions at a majority (52%) of these sites, many with emissions persisting over multiple revisits (weeks to years). We compared against independent contemporaneous in situ airborne observations at 15 landfills and established good agreement. Our findings indicate a need for long-term, synoptic-scale monitoring of landfill emissions in context of climate change mitigation policy.

Bio:

Dan Cusworth is the Science Director for Carbon Mapper. Carbon Mapper’s mission is to drive greenhouse gas emission reductions by making methane and carbon dioxide data accessible and actionable. Dan oversees algorithm development, validation, analysis, and applications of airborne and satellite greenhouse gas datasets. He was formerly a Data Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Research Scientist at University of Arizona and worked on quantification of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions from regional to facility scales. He received his B.S. in Applied Math/Atmospheric Sciences at UCLA and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry at Harvard University.