Location: Forage and Livestock Production Research
Project Number: 3070-31630-007-003-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jul 1, 2016
End Date: Jun 30, 2021
Objective:
Mapping of methane emissions in the Southern Great Plains using Eddy covariance data and meteorological variables.
Approach:
In this project, we propose to use the Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport Model (STILT) to compute the transport of CH4 emission from the hotspots (to be determined in terms of methane emission sources, e.g. cattle farms) located in Oklahoma grazinglands. The STILT takes an ensemble of particles backward in time, spatially starting from hotspot sites (or grid-points), using turbulence fields (vectoring winds, roughness, and surface meteorological variables, air mixing, and PBL) fed by the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) modeling. The STILT derives an influence function (that is, footprint in units of ppb CH4 per unit emission flux) which is directly associated with upwind emissions to the specific sites (or grid-points). We will implement the initial setup of both STILT model and WRF model at the first two months of project, following by the selections of hotspots, modeling CH4 emission, and footprint computations. Deliverable products from this project include two journal manuscripts and mappings of both methane emission and footprints.
