Locating and quantifying multiple landfills methane emissions using aircraft data

This work attempts using a mass balance approach based on the box method on the basis of airborne measurements, coupled with a simple steady-state Gaussian dispersion model to retrieve CH4 emissions from four different landfills located close to each other. This new approach allows to discriminate the emissions of the four landfills, and it is deployable in many similar contexts since landfills are usually characterized by irregular shape and several adjacent surfaces with possibly non-homogeneous waste age and composition. By flying gridded trajectories at different heights above the landfills, we could reconstruct methane mixing ratios and wind vector, both at the edges and inside the sampled box volume, driving an optimization algorithm for individual sources separation. The calculated emissions on one of the landfills were validated against eddy covariance measurements from the same area.