Kevin Gurney usually works on finding holes — carbon sinkholes. Those are places where carbon dioxide is absorbed and stored, thus offsetting or countering some of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere that results from fossil fuel burning. But recently Gurney turned his focus upward, to where spaceships fly.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a 2009 launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite that will measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Since the satellite might provide Gurney with information he needs to answer his research questions about how and where nature stores carbon, he suggested that the observatory would need detailed data on the origins of carbon dioxide.

“It’s been longstanding knowledge that large amounts of CO₂ are removed from the biosphere, but we don’t know where a lot of it goes. The satellite may give us some answers,” says Gurney, an associate professor in the departments of agronomy and earth and atmospheric sciences. “But when I heard about the satellite, I realized that if we didn’t quantify where the CO₂ comes from, the satellite would be a waste of money.”

See Steps to a greener lifestyle

That’s when Gurney launched something of his own: the Vulcan Project, which pinpoints carbon dioxide emission sources, including factories, power plants, homes and vehicles. Much of the data already were available from federal and state agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Census Bureau and county tax records.

“We even used the square footage of residential homes in each census tract around the country,” Gurney says. “The problem was that the information has never been combined and focused on the source and fate of carbon dioxide. The volume of information that we gathered was so cumbersome, it took a year just to ingest it.”

Using the information that they collated and illustrating it on maps of the U.S., Gurney and his group were able to show which areas of the country had the highest pollution. Their maps of CO₂ emissions were a hundred times more detailed than any previous maps. Even more important, they could tell why emissions were high in some areas. For instance, Chicago has high levels of carbon dioxide because of a cold climate and old, inefficient buildings that take a lot of energy to keep warm. Los Angeles has high levels because of the number of automobiles driving long distances.

“We knew before that some of these areas had high emissions, but we couldn’t directly compare all places in the United States and didn’t have a good sense of how much of the emissions came from vehicles in all the locations,” Gurney says.

Vulcan, named for the Roman god of fire, has lots to teach us and can be expanded to offer even more information that industries, governments and even individuals can use to make significant positive differences in how we live, Gurney says. He has received many calls from industry and local government representatives, private citizens and Congressional staffers.

“They want to know what the maps and the assessments mean, especially in the areas where the CO₂ emissions are high,” Gurney says. “We’ve had some calls from people in communities that are doing foot printing.”

Footprinting is determining how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases industries, towns or individuals are contributing so they can take steps to lower it.

“There is no question in my mind that we have just scratched the surface of gathering and analyzing this data,” says Gurney, who used 2002 data for Vulcan. He plans to update it to more current data and also weave it into other information.

“There is just so much more we can do with this information,” he says. “It will be even more powerful if combined with socio-economic information — put within the fabric of a community. We want to focus on how we can use Vulcan to learn about the world around us, how people live. We can take that information and apply it to find new opportunities to slow and adapt to climate change.”

Contact Gurney at kgurney@purdue.edu