"Flaring for All To See"

"Every day at remote oil fields across the globe, unwanted gas burns skyward. What goes up in flames could meet a quarter of the United States' natural gas demand. A small nonprofit using satellite imagery puts it on the map."

"The night sky isn't so inky black anymore – certainly not over North Dakota, Saudi Arabia, Russia or just about any place producing large quantities of oil and gas.

Thanks to flaring, a practice of burning off unwanted natural gas associated with many oil deposits, western North Dakota at night looks as bright as Seattle or Chicago when seen from space.

Enter SkyTruth, a one-man outfit based out of West Virginia and dedicated to using satellite imagery to call attention to environmental concerns, with a new look at the night sky.

Its heatmap shows nightly infrared satellite detections of natural gas flaring across the entire globe, as detected by a NOAA satellite orbiting 500 miles above the planet."

Douglas Fischer reports for the Daily Climate September 5, 2014.