The soil in a drained fjord area, reclaimed for arable farming, produced N 2 O mainly at 75-105 cm depth, just above the ground water level. Surface emissions of N 2 O 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 N 2 O as determined by chamber procedures during a 9-day campaign was 162-202 μg N 2 O-N m - 2 h - 1 from a wheat stubble and 328-467 μg N 2 O-N m - 2 h - 1 from a carrot field. The integrative approaches gave N 2 O emissions of 149-495 μg N 2 O-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 N 2 O emission over the area. When a uniform area with a single type of vegetation had a dominant effect on the N 2 O gradient at the sampling mast, the temporal variation in N 2 O emission determined by the flux gradient/FTIR method and chamber methods was very similar, with differences of only 18% or less in mean N 2 O 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 N 2 O emission and that the precision of the measurements was determined by the spatial variability of the N 2 O emission at the site and the variability inherent in the individual techniques. These results confirm that measurements of N 2 O emissions from different ecosystems obtained by the different methods can be meaningfully compared.