# Measuring Gas Flaring in Russia with Multispectral VIIRS Nightfire
## 3 Results  
The main result of the present work is a gas flare catalog with detailed geographical metadata and annual VIRS Nightfire BCM estimates for individual gas flares in Russia in 2012-2020. The catalog is available as the digital supplement both in a spreadsheet format (as an MS Excel file) and a keyhole markup language zipped (KMZ) format to review geo-located point data in Google Earth (see Supplementary Materials section). An example entry from the latter is presented in Figure S2 in the Supplementary Materials text section. The annual catalog includes gas flares located at upstream, midstream, and downstream oil and gas industry facilities in Russia. In this work, \"upstream\" was defined as flaring occurring within the lease sector boundaries corresponding to an oil or gas field (including primary processing units and inner transportation infrastructure), \"midstream\" was applied to the units of transportation and storage of hydrocarbons outside the oil and gas fields, and \"downstream\" was reserved for oil and gas refineries with deep processing of the raw materials. Upstream sector is further divided into categories based on Rosgeol-fond field classifications (including gas, oil, (natural) gas condensate, and mixed types) with the major component--oil or natural gas--stated alongside with Rosgeolfond classification; downstream facilities include oil refineries, gas processing plants (GPP), liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities, and petrochemical plants. The catalog contains 3220 unique entries (gas flare IDs), each containing 52 data entries including geographical metadata such as information on the field or object's name and its type, administrative region, subsidiary and  
Figure 3: Plot VIRS Nightfire estimated annual sum of radiant heat (\(RH^{\prime}\), in MW) vs. Cedigaz reported gas flaring volumes (in BCM) on national level. Calibration from 2012 to 2017 (solid fill points) is extrapolated to available data for 2018–2019 (unfilled points). The dashed red lines indicate the positions of the 95% confidence intervals. Nightfire \(RH^{\prime}\) estimates for Russia are presented for the oil upstream sector only. parent company or companies (in the case of joint ventures) in possession of the facility, as well as Nightfire data such as information on minimum, maximum and mean temperature, detection frequency, and flaring volumes of the flare ID in MCM (million cubic meters). The gas flaring catalog is described in more detail in Section S1 of the Supplementary Materials. During the observation period, the maximum flare tally (unmodified original VIIIRS Nightfire data) in Russia was observed in 2013-2014 (1495). Since then, it has been steadily declining, with a significant drop (142 unique flare IDs) to 1185 flares detected in 2019 and an increase to 1241 flares observed in 2020. Over the course of the observation period, flaring was detected at 1063 separate oil and gas fields, exploration drillings, midstream and downstream objects. For reference, 2093 oil fields were reported to be in industrial operation in Russia by January 2019 [45]. Among 3220 entries in the catalog, only 6% (190 entries) correspond to gas flares at midstream and downstream facilities. Approximately 33% (1050 entries) of flare IDs were identified at natural gas and gas condensate upstream facilities. Nineteen detected gas flares remained unidentified (i.e., no field/object name specified), while for ten entries, the major extracted component was not identified. Total estimated gas flaring volumes in Russia in 2012-2020 averaged at 23 BCM, with the minimum observed in 2014 (20.1 BCM) and maximum observed in 2020 (25.6 BCM). Approximately 82% of the total gas flaring volume corresponds to the oil upstream sector, with the maximum 20.9 BCM in 2020 and minimum 16.1 BCM in 2014. Approximately 10% of gas flaring occurs at natural gas and gas condensate upstream facilities, with the peak observed in 2020 (3 BCM).