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Large-eddy simulations (LES) coupled to a model that simulates methane emissions from oil and gas production facilities are used to generate realistic distributions of meteorological variables and methane concentrations. These are sampled to obtain simulated observations used to develop and evaluate source term estimation (STE) methods. A widely used EPA STE method (OTM33A) is found to provide emission estimates with little bias when averaged over six time periods and seven well pads. Sixty-four percent of the emissions estimated with OTM33A are within ±30% of the simulated emissions, showing a slightly larger spread than the 72% found previously using controlled release experiments. A newly developed method adopts the OTM33A sampling strategy and uses a variational or a stochastic STE approach coupled to an LES to obtain a better fit to the sampled meteorological conditions and to account for multiple sources within the well pad. This method can considerably reduce the spread of the emissions estimates compared to OTM33A (92-95% within ±30% percent error), but it is associated with a substantial increase in computational cost due to the LES. It thus provides an alternative when the additional costs can be afforded to obtain more precise emission estimates.

The authors suggested acceptance criteria for rural dispersion models' performance measures in this journal in 2004. The current paper suggests modified values of acceptance criteria for urban applications and tests them with tracer data from four urban field experiments. For the arc-maximum concentrations, the fractional bias should have a magnitude <0.67 (i.e., the relative mean bias is less than a factor of 2); the normalized mean-square error should be <6 (i.e., the random scatter is less than about 2.4 times the mean); and the fraction of predictions that are within a factor of two of the observations (FAC2) should be >0.3. For all data paired in space, for which a threshold concentration must always be defined, the normalized absolute difference should be <0.50, when the threshold is three times the instrument's limit of quantification (LOQ). An overall criterion is then applied that the total set of acceptance criteria should be satisfied in at least half of the field experiments. These acceptance criteria are applied to evaluations of the US Department of Defense's Joint Effects Model (JEM) with tracer data from US urban field experiments in Salt Lake City (U2000), Oklahoma City (JU2003), and Manhattan (MSG05 and MID05). JEM includes the SCIPUFF dispersion model with the urban canopy option and the urban dispersion model (UDM) option. In each set of evaluations, three or four likely options are tested for meteorological inputs (e.g., a local building top wind speed, the closest National Weather Service airport observations, or outputs from numerical weather prediction models). It is found that, due to large natural variability in the urban data, there is not a large difference between the performance measures for the two model options and the three or four meteorological input options. The more detailed UDM and the state-of-the-art numerical weather models do provide a slight improvement over the other options. The proposed urban dispersion model acceptance criteria are satisfied at over half of the field experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Surface concentration and its fluctuations from plume dispersion under unstable conditions in a coastal environment are investigated using the model validation program field experimental data. The goal of this study is to better understand plume dispersion under such conditions. Procedures are described to derive the plume surface concentration from moving vehicle measurements. Convective boundary layer scalings are applied and cumulative density functions (CDF) are studied. The results indicate that the relative concentration fluctuation intensity () decreases with the normalized downwind distance () and that it is relatively small at the plume central line and largely increased at the plume edges, consistent with other field and laboratory results. The relation between at the plume centerline () and for elevated sources can be described by . The crosswind plume spread () is found to satisfy Deardorff and Willis''s (J. Appl. Meteorol., 14 (1975) 1451) form of scaled with convective layer depth . For elevated sources, the normalized crosswind integrated concentration () is found to satisfy a relation of , with Yaglom''s (Izr. Atmos. Oceanic Phys., 8 (1972) 333) scaling rule on the free convective layer being applied. Empirical CDFs based on the gamma and the clipped probability density functions show agreements with the experimental CDFs, with the former being better than the latter when . A new clipped-gamma CDF form is proposed based on the analysis of the present data, showing a better agreement. We suggest that a parameter , with combined efforts of surface friction velocity (), Monin–Obukhov stability length () and unstable boundary layer height (), replace the convective velocity scale () under weak convective conditions in a coastal environment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]