SnifferDRONE™ is Top Performer in Independent Methane Detection Study

PREPARED BY: FLUXLAB AND TAREK ABICHOU ST. FRANCIS XAVIER UNIVERSITY, CANADA FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, USA APRIL 2026

In the 2025 controlled release testing hosted by Flux Lab at the Petrolia Landfill SIMFLEX facility, Sniffer (DroneSEM) delivered the strongest overall localization performance across all technologies.

Sniffer excelled in the controlled release experiment.

Download the Study

Part 1: Understanding the Experiment

Part 1: Understanding the Experiment.

Sniffer was invited to participate in five experiments (22, 24, 27, 34, and 35), each limited to 90 minutes. These experiments involved emissions studies over a twenty-acre area of a closed landfill, designed to emulate a landfill with isolated methane emissions. The site, located in Petrolia, Canada, is designed to simulate landfill emission by releasing pure methane gas at point sources on an actual landfill.

Sniffer maximized its time on site to achieve as much sampling as possible within each 90-minute experiment, achieving 3.75m spacing – a case study in the speed and efficiency that can be achieved with the SnifferDRONE.  3.75m spacing allows Sniffer to downsample the data to emulate all multiples of 3.75m spacing, including all known regulatory spacings (7.5m / 25’; 15m; and 30m).  Stay tuned to this series where the data are downsampled to show equivalent performance at 7.5m and nearly identical performance at simulated 11.25m spacing.

Don’t mistake this experiment for OTM-51 compliance testing.

Sniffer was not permitted to perform OTM-51; Method 21 requires secondary inspections of increased meter readings; these secondary inspections were not allowed by the hosts.

Later in this series of blog posts, we will model OTM-51 results from the SnifferDRONE data collected in these experiments. 

Of the 5 experiments, 2 were cut short.

·       Experiment 24 was abruptly stopped after ~40 minutes to pivot to a satellite release.

·       Experiment 35 was abruptly stopped after ~20 minutes for “test infrastructure issues”.

Localization Results:

Sniffer scored the highest amongst all technologies for localization of emissions (Figure 1 – DroneSEM, far right column).  Sniffer had a strong majority of true positives, more than any other technology.  Sniffer was assigned one false positive and two false negatives.  Additionally, Sniffer had the least percentage of both false positives and false negatives.

Figure 1: Localization test reports from Flux Lab

Three Representative Detections:

Figure 2 shows three representative emissions from the SnifferDRONE at Petrolia, ranging from the smallest emission (center, 4.1kg/hr) to the 2^nd largest (right, 50.92 kg/hr).  In each plume, concentrations above 25ppm are colored yellow and concentrations above 200ppm are colored red. The Sniffer reported emission location is identified as a blue circle.  200ppm is a critical concentration in the application of OTM-51, where 200ppm is the increased meter reading concentration that requires manual inspection per Method 21 (not performed in this experiment).

Note how in each experiment multiple SnifferDRONE passes identified concentrations above 200ppm, even in the lowest emission rate seen.  Unlike typical landfill emissions, the 25ppm plume extends well past the actual emission location.  While the SnifferDRONE flies, it infers the wind direction and velocity based on the relative pitch and roll required to stay on the defined path.  The wind roses for experiments 27 (first two plumes of Figure 2) and experiment 34 (right-most plume in Figure 2) are shown in Figure 3; the plumes are well aligned with the wind directions of the wind roses. 

Figure 2: Experiment 34, release location D2 at 14.66kg/hr, left. Experiment 34; Release location Q_B at 4.1kg/hr, middle. Experiment 27; release location Q_B (left emission in right pane) at 13.65kg/hr showing mass enhancement in the larger plume of Q_E at 50.92kg/hr (right emission in right pane).

Figure 3: Wind roses for experiments 27 and 34

Experiment 27 showed the second largest emission at 50.92kg/hr from release location E, with the plume obfuscating an emission from release location B (13.65kg/hr).  The SnifferDRONE measurements showed concentration enhancement in the combined plume and Sniffer therefore correctly reported 2 distinct emission locations.  The extent and size of this plume is believed to be the largest Sniffer has ever recorded.   The maximum recorded concentration at this release location was 15,623ppm; It is the 24^th highest concentration Sniffer has recorded in its previous 500 site surveys (spanning over 10M data points). 

Overall, the Petrolia results confirm that SnifferDRONE™ performed exceptionally well in controlled release testing, but this post is only the starting point. The headline result is clear: DroneSEM delivered the strongest localization performance in the study, even with two experiments cut short and without the full OTM-51 workflow being allowed.

In the next posts in this series, we will dig deeper into what the data shows, detailing our false, positive, both false negatives and real fugitive emissions found during the experiments.