The Future of Greenhouse Gas Mapping

Being the culmination of a three-year project, researchers at Arizona State University and Purdue University have created what will almost certainly prove to be an invaluable tool in monitoring and controlling greenhouse gas emissions well into the future.  That tool is a piece of software called Hestia,prepreg which has already been applied to the city of Indianapolis, with Phoenix and Los Angeles to come.

Hestia is the first real-time computer model of urban carbon emissions.  It draws on a variety of data, including traffic information, reports on air pollution and power production, and simulations of building energy use, in order to bring carbon emissions modeling down to the level of buildings and streets.  If applied to major cities across the United States, this could provide a complete picture of the patterns underlying one quarter of the world’s total emissions.

It is expected that Hestia will aid in determining the most efficient ways of reducing emissions, as well as offering exceptional means of tracking progress even in the short term.  carbon sheetIt will be of use to policy-makers, city planners, and for the sake of additional research, and even this is only a small glimpse of things to come.  Hestia’s data is already slated to be integrated with data regarding ground emissions and changes in concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

It is easy to imagine that modeling software similar to Hestia could gradually construct an elaborate and up-to-the-minute model of both sources and sinks of carbon emissions.  Satellite imaging could keep tabs on the amounts and types of biomass on the Earth’s surface and extrapolate from that a figure for roughly how much carbon is being removed from the air by plant respiration at any given moment.  At the same time,carbon cloth that can be compared to precise data on much is being created by industrial processes and human activity.  In that way, the future may allow us to pinpoint the moment when the tide turns in favor of us winning the battle against anthropogenic climate change.

Over the short term, Hestia will allow researchers to have a clear sense of the reduction in emissions brought about by certain urban projects, like expansions of public transit or investments in solar panels on public buildings. carbon prepreg But a similar and more complete monitoring process could do equally well at calculating the progress of different sorts of efforts aimed at counteracting ongoing emissions, such as re-purposing post-industrial land for urban gardens.

Hopefully these sources of real-time data will soon have no limits in scope like what currently keeps Hestia confined to urban environments.  Efforts outside of those areas could be just as significant in the fight against global warming, and it would be of enormous help to both policy makers and persons responsible for selling initiatives to the general public if we could watch in real time as the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are brought down with each new crop of bamboo that reaches maturity, or as the levels of emissions descend with each expansion of an industry producing green alternatives to typical consumer goods, foods, and clothing.