Comment on amt-2022-39

Abstract

Although small rural settlements are only minor individual sources of greenhouse gases and air pollution, their high overall quantity can significantly contribute to the total emissions of a region or country. The emissions of the rural lifestyle may be remarkably different from that of the urban and industrialized regions, but nevertheless they have been hardly studied so far. In this study, flux measurements at a tall-tower eddy covariance monitoring site and the footprint model FFP are used to determine the real-world wintertime CO, N2O, and CO2 emissions of a small village in western Hungary. The recorded emission densities, dominantly derived from residential heating, are 3.5 μg m-2 s-1, 0.043 μg m-2 s-1, and 72 μg m-2 s-1 for CO, N2O, and CO2, respectively. While the measured CO and CO2 emissions are comparable with those calculated using the assumed energy consumption and applying the according emission factors, the nitrous oxide emission exceeds the expected value by a magnitude. This may indicate that the nitrous oxide emissions are significantly underestimated in the emission inventories, and modifications in the methodology of emission calculations are necessary. Using a 3-dimensional forward transport model, we further show that, in contrast to the flux measurements, the concentration measurements at the regional background monitoring site are only insignificantly influenced by the emissions of the nearby village.