Each GHGSat satellite carries a proprietary imaging spectrometer for measuring facility-level greenhouse gas emissions.

¹Instrument parameters common to GHGSat commercial satellites, which are generally referred to as "CX".

The primary sensor on all GHGSat satellites is a Wide-Angle Fabry-Perot (WAF-P) Imaging Spectrometer. This primary sensor produces a hypercube consisting of a stack of overlapping, spectrally selected images acquired within <30 seconds. This hypercube embeds, for each ground pixel, information equivalent to hundreds of wavelengths from the top-of-the-atmosphere spectral radiance. Once downloaded, the hypercube is corrected for sensor response and instrument optics. The gas column density and surface reflectance information are then retrieved for each ground pixel using a measurement model which includes surface, instrument and atmospheric contributions to radiance. The resulting arrays are georeferenced, giving the "Surface Reflectance Image" and one "Abundance Dataset" for methane.

GHGSat satellites typically have a spatial resolution of 25 m (>50 m for GHGSat-D) and the Field of View (FOV) of approximately 12 km x 12 km of these datasets allow gas plumes emitted from industrial sources to be captured and distinguished from the surrounding background concentrations, constituting a differential measurement.

The reflectance and abundance products can be combined into a high readability "Concentration Map" for human interpretation.

The abundance datasets from multiple observations of a given site can be combined to form a monitoring product for semi-automatic detection of emitter activity or large changes in emission rates using pre-determined thresholds.

Abundance datasets also allow emission rates to be estimated for individual sources. Plume dispersion is modelled using site information and weather data from global meteorological models or local weather stations and matched to the measured datasets.