Area sources are important components of comprehensive air pollution models. The literature describes several approaches to modeling dispersion from such sources, but there is little consensus on an approach that can be applied to arbitrarily shaped area sources and is numerically efficient at the same time. This paper brings together ideas from previous work to propose an approach that meets these requirements. It is based on representing an area source as a set of line sources perpendicular to the wind direction; the number of line sources is determined by the specified precision of the concentration computed at a receptor impacted by the area source. Although AERMOD and the OML model incorporate versions of this approach, the open literature lacks an adequate description. This paper fills this important gap and also provides examples of its application. We show that different shaped area sources with the same emissions and emission density yield significantly different downwind concentration patterns. We then demonstrate the utility of the method through inverse modeling to estimate methane emissions from manure lagoons located in a dairy.