Area facilities, such as landfills, mines, tailings ponds, and collections of point sources such as industrial plants, can be a source of fugitive emissions of airborne matter to the atmosphere that can contribute to change of the local, regional and global air quality. To date, the measurement of fugitive emissions from large area sources (herein defined as greater than 2 hectares) has been hindered by uncertainties pertaining to the accuracy of the methods. The Airborne Matter Mapping (AMM) method is a relatively new method of mapping the concentration of airborne matter in the atmosphere and calculating a flow or emission rate of the airborne matter. In essence, the method applies the mass balance approach by sampling the emission plume with a vehicle and processing the data to develop contour maps of the concentrations of the airborne matter of interest in a cross-section through the emission plume. The wind velocity can be applied to obtain the emission flow rate through the cross-section. Each AMM method measurement round represents a snapshot of an emission rate from the source over the monitoring round period. The AMM method, which is patented in Canada and the United States (Wong, 2011 & 2012) and has previously been described by Wong and Wyles (2012), has potential application to the measurement of fugitive emission rates from large diffuse area sources, including multiple point source releases, as well as from point sources.
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