Recent War-Time Changes in Upstream Gas Flaring Across the Middle East Observed by VIIRS Nightfire
Recent War-Time Changes in Upstream Gas Flaring Across the Middle East Observed by VIIRS Nightfire
PAYNE INSTITUTE COMMENTARY SERIES: COMMENTARY
March 24, 2026
Figure 1. Temporal profile of flare “s_22038” in the Basra region, Iraq, showing an abrupt off/on-type reduction in flaring activity in March 2026. The three panels show pass-level radiance in VIIRS short-wave infrared band M10, detected temperature, and radiative heat, colored by cloud-screen status and detection outcome.
The changes are concentrated in early March 2026, with 249 detected events between 1 and 10 March and a peak of 67 events on 7 March. The accompanying night-lights image is consistent with dimming over southern Iraq, and the example Basra flare dashboard shows an abrupt March shutdown. This dimming of lights is spatially broader than a single facility and appears across the Basra oil-producing corridor (Figure 2), supporting the country-level signal of reduced upstream flaring derived from the flare-event analysis.
Figure 2. Nighttime lights (shown in white) and flaring scene over southern Iraq and the Gulf region from NOAA-21 on 12 March 2026, illustrating regional dimming (shown in red) in the Basra area coincident with reduced flaring activity. The image is consistent with a broader reduction in luminous emissions across the main oil-producing corridor rather than a change confined to a single flare. Probability of cloud cover is shown in blue.
At the country level, the dominant upstream flaring decline is in Iraq (Figure 3), where the summed pass-normalized radiative heat across changed flares falls from 1,722 MW before the detected events to 592 MW after them, a net decline of 1,130 MW. The next largest declines are in the United Arab Emirates (-151 MW), Qatar (-87 MW), and the Saudi crop bucket (-71 MW), with an additional decline of -34 MW in the Saudi Arabia / Kuwait neutral zone. Iran does not show a comparable net drop; instead, summed pass-normalized radiative heat increases by 84 MW across its changed upstream flares.
Figure 3. Country-level change in upstream flaring derived from recent flare events in 2026, expressed as the sum of pass-normalized radiative heat across changed flares before and after the detected step changes. This metric includes non-detected overpasses and is used here as a proxy for relative change in flared gas volume.
REFERENCES
[1] Zhizhin, M.; Elvidge, C.D.; Ghosh, T.; Gleason, G.; Bazilian, M. VIIRS Nightfire Super-Resolution Method for Multiyear Cataloging of Natural Gas Flaring Sites: 2012-2025. Remote Sens. 2026, 18, 314. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18020314
[2] Zhizhin, M.; Elvidge, C.D.; Sparks, T.; Ghosh, T.; Bazilian, M.; Hsu, F.-C. An Improved Calibration for Satellite Estimation of Flared Gas Volumes from VIIRS Nighttime Data. Energies 2025, 18, 4765. https://doi.org/10.3390/en18174765
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mikhail Zhizhin
Research Associate, Earth Observation Group, Payne Institute for Public Policy, Colorado School of Mines
Mikhail Zhizhin, M.Science in mathematics from the Moscow State University in 1984, Ph.D. in computational seismology and pattern recognition from the Russian Acad. Sci. in 1992. Research positions from 1987 to 2012 in geophysics, space research and nuclear physics at Russian Acad. Sci., later at NOAA and CU Boulder. Currently he is a researcher at the Earth Observation Group at Colorado School of Mines. His applied research fields evolved from high performance computing in seismology, geodynamics, terrestrial and space weather to deep learning in remote sensing. He is developing new machine learning algorithms to better understand the Nature with Big Data.
Morgan Bazilian
Director, Payne Institute and Professor of Public Policy, Colorado School of Mines
Morgan Bazilian is the Director of the Payne Institute and a Professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines. Previously, he wD.as lead energy specialist at the World Bank. He has over two decades of experience in the energy sector and is regarded as a leading expert in international affairs, policy and investment. He is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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