Nitrous oxide emission from an agricultural field: Comparison between measurements by flux chamber and micrometerological techniques

The soil in a drained fjord area, reclaimed for arable farming, produced N2O mainly at 75-105 cm depth, just above the ground water level. Surface emissions of N2O were measured from discrete small areas by closed and open-flow chamber methods, using gas chromatographic analysis and over larger areas by integrative methods: flux gradient (analysis by FTIR), conditional sampling (analysis by TDLAS), and eddy covariance (analysis by TDLAS). The mean emission of N2O as determined by chamber procedures during a 9-day campaign was 162-202 mu g N2O-N m(-2) h(-1) from a wheat stubble and 328-467 mu g N2O-N m(-2) h(-1) from a carrot field. The integrative approaches gave N2O emissions of 149-495 mu g N2O-N m(-2) h(-1), i.e. a range similar to those determined with the chamber methods. Wind direction affected the comparison of chamber and integrative methods because of patchiness of the N2O emission over the area. When a uniform area with a single type of vegetation had a dominant effect on the N2O gradient at the sampling mast, the temporal variation in N2O emission determined by the flux gradient/FTIR method and chamber methods was very similar, with differences of only 18% or less in mean N2O emission, well below the variation encountered with the chamber methods themselves. A detailed comparison of FTIR gradient and chamber data taking into account the precise emission footprint showed good agreement. It is concluded that there was no bias between the different approaches used to measure the N2O emission and that the precision of the measurements was determined by the spatial variability of the N2O emission at the site and the variability inherent in the individual techniques. These results confirm that measurements of N2O emissions from different ecosystems obtained by the different methods can be meaningfully compared. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd