A Google engineer named Simon Ilyushchenko has integrated the Project Vulcan CO2 Emission study data into Google Earth as a data layer, showing the CO2 emissions for all 5 states with startling detail.
While several reports and inventories of human fossil fuel CO2 emissions in the US already exist, the most comprehensive one that I know of was produced by Project Vulcan, a team of scientists lead by Dr Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University. Vulcan data represent detailed emissions for all 50 US states in 2002. Dr Gurney presented the most recent results of his work this week at a meeting of North American Carbon Program.
The results produced by Project Vulcan are publicly available, but they are not easy to analyze for a non-scientist, so during my 20% time at Google I have created dynamic maps of the Vulcan data, broken down by sector. You can view the maps in your browser if you have Google Earth plugin installed, or you can load the data in Google Earth itself.
There’s also a great YouTube video of it in-action.
