Odors are typically released into the atmosphere as diffuse emissions from area and volume sources, whose detailed quantification in terms of odor emission rate is often hardly achievable by direct source sampling. Indirect methods, involving the use of micrometeorological methods in order to correlate downwind concentrations to the emission rates, are already mentioned in literature, but rarely found in real applications for the quantification of odor emissions. The instrumentation needed for the development of micrometeorological methods has nowadays become accessible in terms of prices and reliability, thus making the implementation of such methods to industrial applications more and more interesting. For this reason, this work aims to provide an overview of micrometeorological methods and investigate their effective applicability to odors, thereby providing a short description of the physics related to such methods and analyzing the relevant scientific literature. The theoretical basis of these methods is presented, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Moreover, their applicability to the estimation of odor emissions is discussed by providing some suggestions about the suitable ways to evaluate the most critical parameters needed for the calculation of the odor emission rate.
Keywords: Area sources; eddy accumulation; gradient method; odor emissions; source characterization.