Purdue researchers assist with new carbon dioxide emission estimations

A research team that includes computer graphics specialists from Purdue University has unveiled a new planet-wide system for estimating carbon dioxide emissions, a tool for tracking greenhouse gas emissions in climate studies.

Called the “Fossil Fuel Data Assimilation System,” or FFDAS, this new system was used to quantify 15 years of carbon dioxide emissions, every hour, for the entire planet — down to the local scale. Until this system was created, information was presented with less precision or with less reliable techniques.

Researchers unveiled the new system this fall in an article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The team is led by Kevin Robert Gurney, an associate professor in Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences. The Purdue researchers working on the project are Bedrich Benes, associate professor of computer graphics technology; Marek Fiser and Hansso Kim, graduate students in the High Performance Computer Graphics lab; and former Ph.D. student Michel Abdul Massih.

Benes and his team were responsible for the FFDAS web site and the visualizations that appear there and within a YouTube video that explains the research further (see video below).

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