This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Quantifying the global fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) flux at high space/time resolution has emerged as a critical need in both carbon cycle and climate change science. The Vulcan Project led by the Principal Investigator (PI) has recently completed such an inventory for the United States at <10 km/hourly scales with mechanistic detail. In this project, the PI plans to:
Extend Vulcan: Build a global fossil fuel CO2 emissions inventory that more accurately allocates emissions in space/time than is currently available. The PI will combine the recently-constructed global power plant database, monthly energy supply/demand statistics, digital road atlas data, and NASA "nightlights" observations to build this inventory.
Enlist Vulcan: With the improved global Vulcan emissions as a key boundary condition, the PI will generate new inverse estimates of the non-fossil net carbon exchange, utilizing a traditional Bayesian inverse approach and a maximum likelihood ensemble filter assimilation system. Sensitivity and error analysis will be performed.
Enrich Vulcan: The North American Vulcan inventory can offer much more insight through integration of carbon science with social science and economics to create new knowledge and support national priorities in carbon management and climate change mitigation. The open, accessible, visual data will empower/educate the public and overcome many of the conceptual barriers to understanding the climate change problem. This information will be hosted online in an open, visual, web-compliant domain.
Educate with Vulcan: The PI will build the "Footprint" Lab, a virtual learning environment where students "adopt" a country/U.S. state and collaborate with researchers, instructors and the public on discovery, verification, application, and other activities that immerse them in a long-term, collaborative research network. The virtual lab will consist of a geographic information system (GIS)-based, Google Earth-like, interactive, collaborative environment.
This research is part of a long-term vision aimed at advancing fundamental knowledge of carbon biogeochemistry and climate change science through downscaling of fossil fuel CO2 fluxes and incorporating those fluxes into inverse/assimilation systems. This long-term vision also aims to benefit national priorities in carbon management, mitigation, carbon trading and energy policy. In order to build the global fossil CO2 flux inventory and enrich the existing North American inventory a virtual, interactive learning environment will be constructed. This will form the basis of a long-term, web 2.0-style network in which students, instructors, researchers and the public interact, collaborate and share knowledge. The "placed-based" nature of the research offers a compelling entry point for students of diverse geographic, ethnic, and intellectual backgrounds in addition to offering a web-based platform for public engagement and education.
