Canada has one of the largest waste generation rates in the world and landfills are the third largest contributor to annual methane emissions. Canada’s national inventory report for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sinks relies on a First Order Decay (FOD) model to estimate methane (CH4) emissions from landfills; however, through regressions, we observed significant discrepancies and weak correlations between measured and FOD-modelled landfill CH4 emissions. The FOD model has not yet been validated using whole-site flux measurements from ground-based vehicles and aircraft, thus this research utilizes measured CH4 emissions from 35 landfills across Canada as constraints to optimize the FOD landfill estimation model.
