California Air Resources Board

Principal Investigator/Author: Ramin Yazdani

Contractor: University of California, Davis

Contract number: 23RD018

Project Status: Active

Relevant CARB programs: AB 32 Climate Change Scoping Plan, California Methane Research Program, Methane Hotspots Research

Topic areas: Climate Change, Landfill Methane Regulation

Research Summary:

There are many limitations to landfill emission modeling and direct emission monitoring, making it insufficient for accomplishing accurate and complete quantification of annual emissions. Some big challenges include seasonal variability, inter-site variability in landfill operations and emissions controls, and intra-site heterogeneity as landfills exhibit both point-like and area-like source attributes.

The University of California, Davis (UCD) research team will evaluate methods which can address these challenges and quantify annual emissions from landfills more accurately. There's a need to implement and validate new monitoring technologies that can overcome the many limitations of traditional emission calculation approaches. Recent advancements in facility-wide emissions measurement technologies using fixed sensors, mobile platforms, drones, and aircraft have shown some promise. This project aims to:

• deploy multiple technologies at a single landfill for one year
• validate the accuracy of each technology and its representativeness of hourly, daily, seasonal, and annual emissions
• evaluate the extent to which the monitoring technologies can perform spatial mapping of landfill emissions

Keywords: landfills, emission modeling, landfill emissions, annual emissions, monitoring technology, methane