VIIRS Nightfire Super-Resolution Method for Multiyear Cataloging of Natural Gas Flaring Sites: 2012-2025

We present a new method for mapping global gas flaring using a multiyear spatio-temporal database of VIIRS Nightfire (VNF) nighttime infrared detections from the Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, and NOAA-21 satellites. The method is designed to resolve closely spaced industrial combustion sources and to produce a stable, physically meaningful flare catalog suitable for long-term monitoring and emissions analysis. The method combines adaptive spatial aggregation of high-temperature detections with a hierarchical clustering that super-resolves individual flare stacks within oil and gas fields. Post-processing yields physically consistent flare footprints and attraction regions, allowing separation of closely spaced sources. Flare clusters are assigned to operational categories (e.g., upstream, midstream, LNG) using prior catalogs combined with AI-assisted expert interpretation. In this step, a multimodal large language model (LLM) provides contextual classification suggestions based on geospatial information, high-resolution daytime imagery, and detection time-series summaries, while final attribution is performed and validated by domain experts. Compared with annual flare catalogs commonly used for national flaring estimates, the new catalog demonstrates substantially improved performance. It is more selective in the presence of intense atmospheric glow from large flares, identifies approximately twice as many active flares, and localizes individual stacks with ~50 m precision, resolving emitters separated by ~400–700 m. For the well-defined class of downstream flares at LNG export facilities, the catalog achieves complete detectability. These improvements support more accurate flare inventories, facility-level attribution, and policy-relevant assessments of gas flaring activity.