Visual Exploration of the Vulcan CO₂ Data

Advances in scientific understanding have confirmed the fact of climate change driven primarily by rising carbon dioxide levels. Current understanding of CO₂ emissions at space-time scales that are meaningful for carbon-cycle science, climate-change research, industrial management, and carbon trading is limited. The Vulcan Project quantified 2002 US fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions down to the level of individual factories, power plants, roadways, and subcounty residential areas and placed the complete inventory on a common 10 km2/hourly grid to facilitate atmospheric modeling. Standard volume or GIS techniques can help visualize the data, but its size requires specialized techniques.