Articles | Volume 18, issue 20
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-5545-2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Assessing the Detection of Methane Plumes in Offshore Areas Using High-Resolution Imaging Spectrometers
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- Final revised paper (published on 21 Oct 2025)
- Preprint (discussion started on 26 May 2025)
Interactive discussion
Status: closed
Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor
| : Report abuse
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-1917', Anonymous Referee #1, 29 Jun 2025
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Javier Roger, 03 Sep 2025
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-1917', Anonymous Referee #2, 22 Aug 2025
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Javier Roger, 03 Sep 2025
Peer review completion
AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload
AR by Javier Roger on behalf of the Authors (03 Sep 2025)
Author's response
Author's tracked changes
Manuscript
ED: Publish as is (04 Sep 2025) by Haichao Wang
AR by Javier Roger on behalf of the Authors (04 Sep 2025)
Dear Authors,
Thank you for the opportunity to review your manuscript « Assessing the Detection of Methane Plumes in Offshore Areas Using High-Resolution Imaging Spectrometers ». This work studies the parameters that intervene in the detection of methane plumes in offshore areas. It also introduces a method to estimate the probability of detection of a given plume depending on the wind speed, the emission source rate and at-sensor radiances. The study is carried on simulated data but also real plume data mainly from EnMAP and EMIT. The manuscript is well written and provides in depth details on the methodology and the data used in the experiments.
I suggest some minor clarifications and corrections to be considered before I can recommend this work for publication.
L78 - The work presented here strongly relies on the quality of the retrieval method. What is the magnitude of the retrieval error? In particular, how does the retrieval error evolve with respect to the source rate? Please clarify this in the text. This is an important discussion as a high retrieval error could mean that some plumes might be detected with a more precise retrieval method for example. This directly impacts the estimation of Qmin.
L82 - It is common to measure the methane excess in ppm, however the total amount of gas also depends on the height of the column considered when estimating the concentration. Please add in the text the height of the column used for the retrieval. It will clarify the scale of Figure 6.
L140 - Is only one band considered or a combination of bands?
L170 - How are the simulations included in the L1 acquisitions? In particular, how is chosen the plume location in the image ? Is the source placed where the sun glint is the most pronounced? What happens if only the tail of the plume is visible where there is sun glint?
L189 - I appreciate that the authors acknowledged the limitations due to the dataset size. However, I believe that the biases linked to the small dataset size should be more extensively discussed. It is unlikely that 25 plumes can accurately represent all the possible scenarii for a given wind speed. However, this could be mitigated by a wise selection of the 25 plumes. Were the 25 plumes per wind speed sampled randomly or regularly during the LES procedure? What is the correlation between the samples? It might be interesting to compare the correlation between samples and their associated Qmin. To know if 25 samples are sufficient to estimate a POD I suggest to display the complete distribution of Qmin for different wind speeds.
L184 - This means that a Qmin distribution is sampled for a fixed background. It could be interesting to estimate a Qmin distribution using several background with close Rad values. It will enhance the robustness of the Qmin estimate.
L197 - In Eq.6 the parameters a and b are already used in Eq 2 with a different meaning. Please change those notations (or those in Eq 2).
L233 - In Fig 9, please clarify what the normalized NEdL curve brings to the figure.
L284 - The parameters a,b,c in Eq.7 are already used in Eq.2 and Eq.6 with a different meaning. Please change those notations.