Beef cattle methane emissions measured with tracer-ratio and inverse dispersion modelling techniques

Bai, Mei; Velazco, José I.; Coates, Trevor W.; Phillips, Frances A.; Flesch, Thomas K.; Hill, Julian; Mayer, David G.; Tomkins, Nigel W.; Hegarty, Roger S.; Chen, Deli

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-3469-2021

Articles | Volume 14, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-3469-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-3469-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 5

Research article

|

12 May 2021

Research article |

| 12 May 2021

Beef cattle methane emissions measured with tracer-ratio and inverse dispersion modelling techniques

Mei Bai, José I. Velazco, Trevor W. Coates, Frances A. Phillips, Thomas K. Flesch, Julian Hill, David G. Mayer, Nigel W. Tomkins, Roger S. Hegarty, and Deli Chen

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Final revised paper (published on 12 May 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 25 Nov 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Remarks to the amt-2020-445 paper', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 Dec 2020
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', mei bai, 18 Mar 2021
RC2: 'Comment on Bai et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 19 Feb 2021
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', mei bai, 18 Mar 2021

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by mei bai on behalf of the Authors (18 Mar 2021) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (06 Apr 2021) by Daniela Famulari

AR by mei bai on behalf of the Authors (11 Apr 2021) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

The development and validation of management practices to mitigate methane (CH₄) emissions from livestock require accurate emission measurements. We compared the inverse dispersion modelling (IDM) and tracer-ratio techniques to measure CH₄ emissions from cattle. Both measurements agreed well but were higher than IPCC estimates. We suggest that the IDM approach can provide an accurate method of estimating cattle emissions, and IPCC estimates may have larger uncertainties.