Simulating methane plumes was done based on meteorological data and the EPA ISC3 model to estimate the contributions of Milton landfill to a sensor.
This is important because it allows us to get an idea of the emission patterns from a landfill site with only one sensor recording and knowledge of the atmosphere. Models like this are useful for accountability and environmental regulation.Abstract
This report attempts to constrain the emissive methane (CH4 ) flux from Milton Landfill using a steady-state gaussian plume model to reconstruct emissions from methance concentration data recorded at Microsoft Research Cambridge (MRC) in June 2024. Our model neglects the advection time of CH4 in favour of a steady-state statistical model which depends only on the wind vector and atmospheric stability which we can reconstruct from the MRC data. Using the EPA’s ISC3 model’s parameters, we find that the flux depends on whether we take the model to be a point, line or area source. It is likely that the point source is the most physical model as the concentration seems best reproduced from the onsite gas flaring plant’s emissions, though the areal source provides a qualitiatively good fit at low concentrations. Other than three "spike" events, likely associated with landfill collapse or methane release events, the background flux is between 7.75 g s−1 and 2.65 g s−1
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