C-attle Footprint| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Your challenge is to identify local sources of carbon emissions and/or estimate amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities to aid scientists in mapping carbon sources and sinks. How can you inform decisions to adapt to the consequences of a changing world and aid policy makers in making plans for the future?

C-attle Footprint - Who passed (the) gas?

Summary

An interactive realtime visual tool to track, assess, and estimate greenhouse gas emissions and visualize our carbon footprint

How We Addressed This Challenge

The Problem





  • Greenhouse gases produced from man-made activities are being released into the atmosphere at an increasing rate each year
  • Scientists and Policy-makers need to be informed on how human activities are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions
  • While datasets exist for certain gas emissions and natural disasters, there is no one-stop solution for visualizing all this


The Solution





  • An interactive web application that tracks and visualizes GHG emissions
  • Land use drivers ( such as human settlement, topography, land cover), power plants, and fire datasets coupled with GHG emission data and fire data informs policy makers on legislative decisions relating fund allocation/land development


The Future





  • Predictive Analytics to determine increase/decrease in emissions for given area with change in usage
  • Human Activity tagging for region-based GHG emissions
  • Embedded GEE Application in custom dashboard for enterprise users
  • More Natural Disaster vs. gas emissions monitoring
How We Developed This Project

How Does it Work?


We used:





  • Google Earth Engine hosted web application
  • Configurable Map visualizations for different GHG emissions and sources 
  • JavaScript API for scripting
  • On-the-fly geospatial calculations


Steps:





  • The user is provided with a publicly available link the web app. The map by default shows base layers of human settlement, global power plants and topography.
  • The user can then select a point on the map, that pops up a drop-down menu for selecting greenhouse gas.
  • Selecting any gas shows up the median emissions over the available period of record on the map, as well as a timeseries of trends of emission over the past
  • The user can click on any point on the timeseries chart to show the emission for that particular date.
  • There is also a reference point on the map to compare trends of emissions
  • Comparisons/assessments can be performed for emission against any of the 5 parameters - topography, human settlement, fire, power plants, and land use.



The app has the potential to be used for predictions of GHG emissions in future using the different drivers included in this project.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Datasets


(a) Greenhouse Gas Emission Datasets:





  • ESA Copernicus Sentinel-5P TROPOMI GHG offline datasets - CH4, CO, O3, NO2


(b) Parameters for assessing Carbon Footprint:





  • EC JRC - GHSL: Global Human Settlement Layers
  • NASA - MODIS Burned Area Monthly Global 500m
  • MODIS Land Cover Type Yearly Global 500m
  • NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Digital Elevation Model (DEM) 30m
  • Global Power Plants Dataset: Global Energy Observatory, Google, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Enipedia, World Resources Institute. 2018. Published on Resource Watch and Google Earth Engine; http://resourcewatch.org/ https://earthengine.google.com/
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources

Data sources:










  • ESA Copernicus Sentinel-5P TROPOMI GHG offline datasets
  • EC JRC - GHSL: Global Human Settlement Layers
  • NASA - MODIS Burned Area Monthly Global 500m
  • MODIS Land Cover Type Yearly Global 500m
  • NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Digital Elevation Model (DEM) 30m
  • Global Power Plants Dataset: Global Energy Observatory, Google, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Enipedia, World Resources Institute. 2018. Published on Resource Watch and Google Earth Engine; http://resourcewatch.org/ https://earthengine.google.com/
Tags
#ghg-emissions, #carbon-footprint, #human-impacts, #cloud-computing
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.