It was almost 10 years ago when Andrew Thorpe received a text from the crew flying overhead in a small aircraft: They had spotted a new methane hot spot.

Thorpe drove along winding dirt and mountain roads in an unwieldy rental SUV near the Four Corners region of the southwestern U.S. When he arrived at the spot relayed from the plane, he pulled out a thermal camera to scan for the plume. Sure enough, methane was seeping out of the ground, likely from a pipeline leak.

He found a marker sticking out of the desert with the phone number for a gas company, so he gave them a call. “I had the most confused individual on the other side of the phone,” Thorpe said. “I was trying to explain to them why I was calling, but this was back many years ago when there really weren’t any technologies that could do this.”

Over the years, the work has gotten Thorpe some unwanted attention. “I did some driving surveys in California .… A rent-a-cop was very suspicious of me and tried to scare me off,” said Thorpe. “If you set up a thermal camera on a public road and you’re pointing it at a tank beyond the fence, people are going to get nervous. I’ve been heckled by some oil and gas workers, but that’s par for the course.”

Today, Thorpe is part of a group that is at the forefront of greenhouse gas monitoring at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. For over 40 years, the Microdevices Laboratory at JPL has developed specialized instruments to measure methane and carbon dioxide with extreme precision.

The instruments, called spectrometers, detect gases based on which colors of sunlight they absorb. Earlier this year, a team of researchers from JPL, Caltech and research nonprofit Carnegie Science was selected as a finalist for a NASA award to put the technology into orbit.

If chosen for the satellite mission, the team’s carbon investigation, called Carbon-I, would launch in the early 2030s. Over the course of three years, Carbon-I would continuously map greenhouse gas emissions around the globe and take daily snapshots of areas of interest, allowing scientists to identify sources of climate pollution, such as power plants, pipeline leaks, farms and landfills.

While there are already multiple satellites monitoring these gases, Carbon-I’s resolution is unprecedented and would eliminate any guesswork in determining where the gas was emitted. “There’s no denying it anymore — once we see a plume, there’s no other potential source,” said Christian Frankenberg, co-principal investigator for Carbon-I and a professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech.

Caltech professor Christian Frankenberg, co-principal investigator for the proposed space-based Carbon-I emission-monitoring system, peers into an AVIRIS monitor under construction in a JPL lab.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Carbon-I’s finest, 100-foot resolution “is a very high resolution from space. That’s an incredible resolution to be able to get,” said Debra Wunch, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies Earth’s carbon cycle and is not involved in the Carbon-I proposal. “It would be able to give us much more insight into exactly the source of emissions .… This would be groundbreaking. You would be able to see individual stacks, individual parts of landfills, even.”

Historically, monitoring the release of greenhouse gases from individual emitters has been challenging — both carbon dioxide and methane are colorless and odorless. So scientists have often had to rely on adding up self-reported values from companies and estimates from research. For example, to estimate the amount of methane cows produce, scientists would have to determine how much methane one cow releases and multiply it by the total number of cows on Earth.

“If you look at international policies … currently they’re all based on these bottom-up inventories,” said Anna Michalak, co-principal investigator for Carbon-I and the founding director of the Carnegie Climate and Resilience Hub at Carnegie Science. “We need to get to a point where … we actually have an independent way of tracking what the emissions are.”

Carbon-I’s resolution will also give scientists new access to the atmosphere of the tropics, where clouds currently obscure most forms of satellite surveillance. “It’s their Achilles’ heel,” said Frankenberg.

Since tropical and subtropical forests absorb roughly a quarter of the CO2 humanity produces by burning fossil fuels, accurate data from this region of the globe is badly needed.

Satellites currently orbiting Earth with lower resolution can’t see through small gaps in the cloud coverage. They only see a blurred average of the cloudy and clear spots in the sky for each pixel. Carbon-I, with each pixel’s area almost 50 times smaller than that of most other satellites, can see the clearings and take measurements through them. In an April 2024 paper, Frankenberg, Michalak and their collaborators estimated that Carbon-I would be able to see past the clouds in the tropics anywhere from 10 to 100 times more frequently than its predecessors.

Carbon-I “is going to see things where people don’t know what’s going on,” said Thorpe, who has moved on from his graduate school days pointing thermal cameras at gas leaks and now works as a research technologist with the Microdevices Laboratory. “It’s going to open a whole new realm of science.”

JPL’s airborne greenhouse gas-monitoring program goes back decades, but the field of space monitoring is still fairly new. Near the start of 2016, NASA headquarters contacted the JPL team. There was an ongoing massive blowout at the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility near Porter Ranch, and NASA wanted the team to check it out.

The team flew over the site in a variant of a 1960s-era spy plane on three days over the course of a month while the Southern California Gas Co. fought to contain the blowout. At the same time, NASA’s Goddard Flight Center in Maryland pointed the NASA Earth Observing spacecraft’s Hyperion spectrometer at the leak.

Hyperion was designed to make observations of the Earth’s surface and filter out noise from the atmosphere. Now, they were trying to observe the atmosphere and filter out the surface, and for the first time, scientists observed a human-made point source of methane from orbit.

“The Hyperion result was pretty noisy, but you could still see the plume,” said Thorpe. “This was really a proof of concept that we could do it from space.”

Even if Carbon-I launches, it doesn’t mean the team will stop putting instruments on planes. From aircraft, the team is able to monitor areas of interest in even sharper resolution and for consecutive days at a time. Right now, a leaner, meaner version of the spectrometers that observed the Four Corners leak and Aliso Canyon blowout is flying a series of missions to monitor the emissions of offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

The twin-engine King Air plane used by JPL to conduct greenhouse gas-monitoring flights in its hangar at Hollywood Burbank Airport.

(Noah Haggerty/Los Angeles Times)

Plane missions also give the team an opportunity to try out new and improve spectrometers. “You can fix them, and you can upgrade them,” said JPL engineer Michael Eastwood, who’s worked with the spectrometers for over three decades and regularly flies with them. “You can take more risks, as opposed to spacecraft that need really mature, really well-known, high reliability — we’re not constrained like that.”

The air team is nimble, too. Typically, two crew members sit in the second row of a King Air twin-propeller aircraft looking at a stack of laptops and instruments with enough buttons to rival the plane’s cockpit. On the screens, they can look at real-time GPS data and spectrometer results and coordinate a flight plan with the pilots. The spectrometer — called AVIRIS, short for Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer — sits in the third row, looking down through a window cut out in the floor.

The NASA program for which Carbon-I was selected as a finalist aims to fund space-based Earth science that will benefit society. The team was awarded $5 million to sharpen its project proposal before a final NASA review in 2025. There are three other finalists, and two will be selected for the launch.

This two-step process for selecting missions is new for NASA’s Earth science programs and requires JPL to compete with the rest of the scientific community, independent of their association with the space agency.

“If we’re talking about grocery money, [$5 million] seems like a lot of money, but it’s really a bargain,” said Michalak. “If you think about the fact that you’re committing $300 million toward a mission, spending 1.5% of that to really make sure it’s going to be fabulous and successful is extremely smart.”

In the meantime, the Carbon-I team is focused on showing NASA that it has the technical know-how to execute the project on time and under budget.

“I think all four of the missions in the current phase are absolutely worthwhile scientific missions,” said Michalak, “and 50% odds are not bad odds for a satellite mission.”

Signs of H5N1 bird flu virus have been detected at three wastewater sites in California’s Bay Area, according to sampling data.

While positive wastewater samples have been found in seven other states, California is the only one that has yet to report a bird flu outbreak in a herd of dairy cows.

Genetic evidence of bird flu was detected in San Francisco wastewater on June 18 and June 26. Additional H5 “hits” were seen at a site in Palo Alto on June 19, and another on June 10 from the West County Wastewater facility in Richmond.

According to the San Francisco Department of Public Health, officials have been closely monitoring H5N1 along with federal, state and local partners, and are “aware of the recent detections of fragments of H5N1 in San Francisco’s wastewater.”

“As with the previous detections reported from before mid-May 2024, it is unclear what the source of H5N1 is, and an investigation is ongoing,” wrote department officials in a statement. “It is possible that it originated from bird waste or waste from other animals due to San Francisco’s sewer system that collects and treats both wastewater and stormwater in the same network of pipes.”

Health officials said the risk remains low for the general public.

The virus has not been identified in California cows, but it has been found in wild birds and domestic poultry in the state.

The finding “is concerning” because of their urban origin, said Devabhaktuni Srikrishna, an entrepreneur who is developing techniques for disease detection, and the chief executive and founder of PatientKnowHow.com. “There are not many dairy or animal farms in San Francisco.”

There are also no dairy farms in Palo Alto or Richmond.

The plant manager from Palo Alto was out of the office Friday, so could not comment. A spokesperson for the Richmond site directed questions to the state.

A request for comment from the state’s Wastewater Surveillance Program had not yet been returned.

Although the samples from the Bay Area wastewater sites tested positive for H5, the testing was not specific to H5N1.

However, researchers say a positive genetic identification for H5 is suggestive of bird flu — whether H5N1, the virus that has been found in U.S. dairy cattle (and which has infected three dairy workers ) or H5N2, the subtype implicated in the death of a man from Mexico City this month.

Most human influenza A viruses are of the H1 and H3 variety.

The virus has been detected in 133 dairy herds across 12 states. It has also been found in wild birds and domestic poultry flocks throughout the United States.

In recent weeks, H5 was also detected in wastewater samples in Idaho. among other states.

While there is “no threat to the general public from the H5 detection in wastewater” at this time, said Christine Hahn, Idaho state epidemiologist, “we have determined that it is important that we work to understand these recent findings as much as possible.”

The state is working in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate the issue.

WastewaterSCAN, the research organization that detected the virus, is an infectious disease monitoring network run by researchers at Stanford, Emory University and Verily, Alphabet Inc.’s life sciences organization.

A review of their data — which samples from 194 locations across the country — suggests H5 has also been detected at sites in Michigan, Texas, Minnesota, South Dakota and Iowa.

California is the only one of these states that has not reported H5N1-infected cattle.

JURUPA VALLEY, Calif. — 

After a contentious five-hour public meeting, environmentalists advocates have persuaded Inland Empire officials to delay development of a project within 400 feet of one of the oldest known plants in the state and the third-oldest in the world.

“Tonight has been a real learning process,” Jurupa Valley City Planning Commission Chair Penny Newman said at the Thursday meeting. “I think we all need time to process the information we’ve had here tonight.”

The commission voted unanimously to table the vote. Commissioners said the developers must do more studies into the potential effects on the plant, a Palmer oak, and further explore protective measures. Commissioners also requested more details on a plan to transfer ownership of the tree and surrounding land to a local tribe, who would oversee its conservation.

“We have discovered a treasure on the world stage here in our humble city,” lifelong Jurupa Valley resident Jennifer Iyer said at the meeting. “In a city known for its toxic waste dump, the worst air quality in the nation … let’s have a plan that protects and celebrates something unique that makes us proud.”

The roughly 370-acre development would include residential housing, an elementary school, a business park and industrial buildings. It would leave the tree on a 27-acre rocky outcrop, but it would come within 400 feet of the plant. Scientists and tribal members say the oak has been around for at least 13,000 years — surviving the last ice age and, more recently, the founding of the United States.

Members of the Shiishongna Tongva Nation, the Corona Band Of Gabrieleño Indians and the Kizh Nation, Gabrieleño Band Of Mission Indians have lived in the Santa Ana River Basin for millennia as well. Both groups regard the tree as sacred.

“We’ve known about this tree forever,” said Michael Negrete, chief and chairperson of the Shiishongna Tongva Nation. “It gives medicine. It gives oxygen. It gives life to the animals.”

Companies have been trying to develop the land since the early 1990s, with Richland Communities presenting the current plan in 2019. After discussions with the City Planning Commission and the public, it has replaced potential warehouses with light industrial space and a business park, increased the amount of open space, and committed to transfer ownership and conservation responsibilities of the land with the Palmer oak to a Native tribe or conservation organization.

Richland Communities announced at the meeting that it had reached an agreement in concept to transfer the land to the Kizh Nation and provide them with a $250,000 initial endowment for conservation. Company executives also proposed requiring the agreement to be finalized before construction begins on the industrial and business sections, which are closest to the tree.

Commissioners want additional information on the plan’s details and how conservation of the land would be legally enforced. Richland Communities did not respond to a request for comment.

Compared to rugged California live oaks, the Palmer oak looks more like a shrub and is made up of individual stems sprouting in a grove. It wasn’t until fairly recently that researchers determined its impressive age.

Mitchell Provance, a botanist and associate researcher at UC Riverside, first noticed the oak more than two decades ago and found it odd that it lived isolated from other members of its species in an area that was much lower and hotter than where the trees usually grow. He began discussing the tree with his colleagues. They hypothesized that it was the last holdout from a time when the region was cooler and wetter — a much friendlier environment for the oaks.

To see if this was the case, the researchers collected samples from multiple dead stems —and, sure enough, they all had identical DNA. Whenever the tree was damaged by a fire, it would resprout from the base of its trunk. By using tree rings to estimate how much the trunk can grow in a year, the team was able to calculate the tree’s age by measuring the grove’s diameter.

Today, the grove measures 80 feet wide, which led researchers to estimate that the tree is between 13,000 and 18,000 years old. It’s possible that the tree has been able to reproduce with itself, instead of just resprouting from the trunk to produce clones, but this is unlikely, experts say.

While the company has worked with the environmental consultant FirstCarbon Solutions to study the impact of construction vibrations on the tree and identify potential water sources, it has not mapped the tree’s root system or confirmed its direct water source — a process that would involve chemical testing of water at the oak’s roots.

Some also worry the proposed development would expose the aged oak to the urban heat island effect — a phenomenon in which developed areas can run 1 to 7 degrees higher than shaded, natural areas during the day.

Aaron Echols, the conservation chair of the Riverside/San Bernardino California Native Plants Society, said it was the duty of conservation groups to point out potential effects on the tree that haven’t yet been studied. “The burden to mitigate impacts … that’s on the applicant and the consultant.”

Environmentalist Aaron Echols walks along a dirt path across from a giant hill where the Palmer oak is located. The development would extend up to the base of the hill.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The portion of the environmental impact review discussing the Palmer oak — including its exact location — has been redacted from public documents. The city was required to do this by law, since the tree has sensitive cultural significance to the Native tribes. Consequently, independent scientists have been unable to scrutinize the report.

The city said it would explore “creative ways” to legally allow a select few third-party experts to view and discuss the report.