Project Vulcan Video -HighRes Fossil-Fuel Footprint Map of U.S.
A team of scientists at Purdue university recently completed an extremely detailed analysis and high-resolution video map of the emission of CO2 in the United States. They included every sector: power generation, manufacturing, transportation, etc., and then they used advanced atmospheric models to track the gas.
It's part of a research project they're calling "Project Vulcan," which included a staggering video of the "Nation Breathing." Vulcan -the ancient god of fire and volacnoes, would give it five stars.
The CO2 swells into the atmosphere, covering more of the nation hour by hour until folks start get home and start relaxing more, and consuming less.
The work, known as The Vulcan Project, has already yielded a significant discovery: Previous CO2 estimates that used population as a proxy for emissions overestimated the Northeast's greenhouse-gas generation, while underestimating the coal-heavy Southeast's contribution.
In 2008, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) -a new Earth orbiting mission sponsored by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program- will collect precise global measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere. This improved understanding will enable more reliable forecasts of future changes in the abundance and distribution of CO2 in the atmosphere and the effect that these changes may have on the Earth's climate.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon.Thanks!
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1528/79/
Will this project take other pollutants into account, & other ways of generating / distributing said pollutants ? This MIGHT show some people the outright fallacy of relying solely on unrenewable, rapidly depleting fossil fuels.
Posted by: knoxvilledaniel | April 11, 2008 at 08:45 PM