Blue Collar Scientist

Well, actually not. I live in Anchorage now, but the county immediately to the north of where I grew up is the fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the United States. A dubious honor at best.

The data comes from the Vulcan Project, which recently generated some of the most interesting visualizations of CO₂ emission that I’ve seen.

Scientists using the Vulcan system have generated the most detailed temporal-spatial maps of CO₂ in the United States.

Vulcan directly measures carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and other air pollutants. But there is a strong correlation between CO₂ emission and the emission of these other pollutants, so the Vulcan data allows you to accurately calculate the presence of the global warming gas.

Purdue’s press release has some interesting fodder.

“For example, we’ve been attributing too many emissions to the northeastern United States, and it’s looking like the southeastern U.S. is a much larger source than we had estimated previously,” says Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric science at Purdue University and leader of the project.

The steamroller of evidence on the anthropogeny of greenhouse gas increases continues to move on pretty relentlessly, with the last few months showing a number of really impressive visualizations of CO₂ data. I think at this point that astronomers like myself don’t have visualizations as impressive as this one….

Researchers using SCIAMACHY, an instrument on ESA’s Envisat, have now imaged excess carbon dioxide in populated regions of Earth.

The researchers explain:

Dr Michael Buchwitz from the Institute of Environmental Physics (IUP) at the University of Bremen in Germany and his colleagues detected the relatively weak atmospheric CO2 signal arising from regional ‘anthropogenic’, or manmade, CO2 emissions over Europe by processing and analysing SCIAMACHY data from 2003 to 2005.

“The natural CO2 fluxes between the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface are typically much larger than the CO2 fluxes arising from manmade CO2 emissions, making the detection of regional anthropogenic CO2 emission signals quite difficult,” Buchwitz explained.

“This does not mean, however, that the anthropogenic fluxes are of minor importance. In fact, the opposite is true because the manmade fluxes are only going in one direction whereas the natural fluxes operate in both directions, taking up atmospheric CO2 when plants grow, but releasing most or all of it again later when the plants decay. This results in higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the first half of a year followed by lower CO2 during the second half of a year with a minimum around August.

“That we are able to detect regionally elevated CO2 over Europe shows the high quality of the SCIAMACHY CO2 measurements.”

The main reason this is of interest to me is that Alaska has a very substantial population of global warming/climate change/anthropogenic CO₂ conspiracy theorists and denialists. And now there are pictures. It is hard to just explain away pictures, but I’m sure they will try, when they stop ignoring the research (which is their main tactic for dealing with the issue).