Monitoring and Modeling of Reactive Organic Gasses as Ozone Precursors at California Dairies

摘要

A typical dairy cow in California produces between 80 and 140 pounds of manure each day. Within California's San Joaquin Valley, there are nearly 1.5 million producing dairy cows. For decades, the typical practice for managing this waste has been to flush the manure into storage lagoons. The water in the lagoons is used for subsequent flush water and, along with the recovered solid manure, is eventually applied to crops. Based on current California Air Resources Board estimates, dairies are a significant source of reactive organic gas (ROG) emissions in the San Joaquin Valley. Accurately quantifying dairy emissions is extremely difficult due to the complexity of the source, with its many dispersed biological process, as well as the challenges in sampling, analyzing, and modeling the collected emissions data. Quantification of ROG emissions is important since it is a component in the reaction that forms ground-level ozone, an air quality category for which the valley is designated as "non-attainment".