# PlumeQuant: Uncertainty-aware consistency assessment of methane plume masks and emission-rate estimates

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13945/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Impact of Scene-Specific Enhancement Spectra on Matched Filter Greenhouse Gas Retrievals from Imaging Spectroscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05578/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Imaging spectrometers increasingly distribute source-resolved methane plume products in which the plume mask, integrated mass enhancement (IME), plume length, emission rate, and uncertainty are physically and algorithmically linked. Using 63 EMIT-derived Carbon Mapper plume records from 27 scenes, we show that these published scalar quantities do not uniquely constrain the plume boundary: substantially different yet plausible masks reproduce the same IME, plume length, and emission rate. Genetic-algorithm (GA) ensembles conditioned on the published IME and plume length make this equifinality explicit: the high-confidence core selected by nearly all target-consistent masks covers a median of 13% of the plausible footprint envelope, and ambiguity is largest for weak, low-overlap plumes. The diagnostics come from PlumeQuant, which recomputes IME, plume length, emission rate, and five-term uncertainty from distributed product components under stated conventions and evaluates four mask representations: the distributed reference mask, a transparent Carbon Mapper-informed analogue (CM-like), the GA ensemble, and optional expert edits. The CM-like mask is generated per plume without access to the reference mask or published quantities, with settings fixed once on a scene-disjoint 44-plume development split. It reproduced published IME with +0.72% median difference and emission rate with +0.16% (6.98% mean absolute), reached 0.843 median intersection-over-union against the reference masks, and matched the published uncertainty scale (median ratio 1.01). Holdout mean absolute errors were 7.6% (IME), 9.5% (length), and 6.1% (rate). These are product-level consistency diagnostics, not independent validation. They flag weak, offset, or ambiguous plumes for expert review.