Innovation of flux chamber network design for surface methane emission from landfills using spatial interpolation models.

Solid waste landfills are one of the primary anthropogenic sources of methane emissions which are often estimated by flux chamber measurements on landfill surfaces. Due to the small footprint of the flux chamber on the surface coverage, however, it is important to design a proper spatial deployment of the chambers with an optimal number of measurement points such that the measured fluxes are correctly scaled up to the whole landfill area. In order to improve the design of flux chamber network, several deterministic interpolation models were applied and results of reproducibility tests with 22 flux measurement data sets from ten municipal solid waste landfills in the Republic of Korea were compared one another. The bilinear model and natural neighbor model among the deterministic models showed stable results in all cases. The surface methane emissions estimated from arithmetic or geometric mean resulted in significant under- or overestimation compared to spatial interpolation methods in all data sets. As a result of this study, minimal number of flux measurement points could be determined for target error levels. Innovative flux chamber network design with proper measurement points will improve the accuracy of methane emission estimate from solid waste landfills.