Project Vulcan, named after the Roman god of fire, assessed carbon ‘footprints” across the country.
In the image to the right, created with data released by the project’s research team, areas generating the highest amounts of CO2 appear deep red while those spewing the least amounts are indicated in pale yellow.
Not surprisingly, urban centers are the focus of most CO2 emissions, with the densely populated northeastern cities being among the worst polluters.
But the map also shows that cities such as Saint Paul, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Los Angeles generated high emissions.
Project Vulcan used a new approach to determine carbon dioxide emissions by region. Earlier research had merely correlated population density with high emissions, missing other factors such as a busy interstate highway passing through a sparsely populated area.
A more accurate estimate of CO2 pollution was made by using a variety of statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Highway Administration and the Census Bureau.
The project also examined county records on building sizes, road extents and registered vehicles. Feeding this information into computer models produced this map of carbon dioxide emissions.
The NASA image and animation were created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, based on data from Project Vulcan.
