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FIELD EVALUATION OF A METHOD FOR ESTIMATING GASEOUS FLUXES FROM AREA SOURCES USING OPEN-PATH FOURIER TRANSFORM INFRARED
Citation:
Hashmonay, R. A., D. F. Natschke, K. Wagoner, D B. Harris*, E L. Thompson*, AND M. G. Yost. FIELD EVALUATION OF A METHOD FOR ESTIMATING GASEOUS FLUXES FROM AREA SOURCES USING OPEN-PATH FOURIER TRANSFORM INFRARED. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 35(11):2309-2313, (2001).
Description:
The paper describes preliminary results from a field experiment designed to evaluate a new approach to quantifying gaseous fugitive emissions from area air pollution sources. The new approach combines path-integrated concentration data acquired with any path-integrated optical remote sensing (PI-ORS) technique and computed tomography (CT) technique. In this study, an open-path Fourier transform infrared instrument sampled path-integrated concentrations along 5 radial beam paths in a vertical plane downwind from the source. A meteorological station collected measurements of wind direction and wind speed. Nitrous oxide was released from a controlled area source simulator. The innovative CT technique, which applies the smooth basis function minimization method to the beam data in conjunction with measured wind data, was used to estimate the total flux from the simulated area source. The new-approach estimates agreed with the true emissions rates in unstable atmospheric conditions and consistently overestimated the true emissions rates in neutral atmospheric conditions. This approach is applicable to many types of industrial area or volume sources, given the use of an adequate PI-ORS system.