Kevin Gurney, BSc MSc PhD - US grants

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

Quantifying the global fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) flux at high space/time resolution has emerged as a critical need in both carbon cycle and climate change science. The Vulcan Project led by the Principal Investigator (PI) has recently completed such an inventory for the United States at <10 km/hourly scales with mechanistic detail. In this project, the PI plans to:

Extend Vulcan: Build a global fossil fuel CO2 emissions inventory that more accurately allocates emissions in space/time than is currently available. The PI will combine the recently-constructed global power plant database, monthly energy supply/demand statistics, digital road atlas data, and NASA "nightlights" observations to build this inventory.

Enlist Vulcan: With the improved global Vulcan emissions as a key boundary condition, the PI will generate new inverse estimates of the non-fossil net carbon exchange, utilizing a traditional Bayesian inverse approach and a maximum likelihood ensemble filter assimilation system. Sensitivity and error analysis will be performed.

Enrich Vulcan: The North American Vulcan inventory can offer much more insight through integration of carbon science with social science and economics to create new knowledge and support national priorities in carbon management and climate change mitigation. The open, accessible, visual data will empower/educate the public and overcome many of the conceptual barriers to understanding the climate change problem. This information will be hosted online in an open, visual, web-compliant domain.

Educate with Vulcan: The PI will build the "Footprint" Lab, a virtual learning environment where students "adopt" a country/U.S. state and collaborate with researchers, instructors and the public on discovery, verification, application, and other activities that immerse them in a long-term, collaborative research network. The virtual lab will consist of a geographic information system (GIS)-based, Google Earth-like, interactive, collaborative environment.

This research is part of a long-term vision aimed at advancing fundamental knowledge of carbon biogeochemistry and climate change science through downscaling of fossil fuel CO2 fluxes and incorporating those fluxes into inverse/assimilation systems. This long-term vision also aims to benefit national priorities in carbon management, mitigation, carbon trading and energy policy. In order to build the global fossil CO2 flux inventory and enrich the existing North American inventory a virtual, interactive learning environment will be constructed. This will form the basis of a long-term, web 2.0-style network in which students, instructors, researchers and the public interact, collaborate and share knowledge. The "placed-based" nature of the research offers a compelling entry point for students of diverse geographic, ethnic, and intellectual backgrounds in addition to offering a web-based platform for public engagement and education.

The Food, Energy, and Water (FEW) system is complex, vulnerable to societal and environmental changes, yet critical for national well-being. This project's major contribution is to create and exploit the first detailed mapping of the Food, Energy, and Water System of the United States. Using this capability will improve understanding of how local Food, Energy, and Water policy decisions and technologies cause ripple effects throughout the system (for example, how electricity usage in an American city affects rivers hundreds of miles away). Policies and technologies often pose trade-offs between Food, Energy, and Water systems, and this project is measuring those trade-offs so costs and benefits may be understood and balanced in future decisions. By studying how past events like droughts, storms, wars, or economic crises have affected the nation's Food, Energy, and Water System, this project is developing the capacity to anticipate the impacts of future events.

The project provides an empirical basis for advances in theory and scientific modeling of the complete food-energy-water (FEW) system of the United States. The system is primarily composed of mesoscale phenomena in which regional trade, river basins and aquifers, irrigation districts, crop belts, states, tribes, counties and cities, power grids, climate gradients, and seasonal timescales interact in a dynamic, inter-connected coupled natural-human system. To advance understanding of these interactions, a reliable and complete empirical description of the FEW system is needed. This requires a dataset containing consumption, production, and bilateral trade data for the United States, with sub-county resolution. A retrospective version of this dataset (containing data from the mid-20th century to the present), will serve as a model network for the FEW system's emergent performance metrics, sustainability metrics, and supply-chain teleconnections, along with observed historical dynamics of system response, vulnerability, and resilience to stresses and shocks. A wide range of diverse and disparate (but mostly pre-existing) economic, climate, and environmental data will be assembled to create the first comprehensive empirical map of the U.S. Food, Energy, and Water system (the FEWSion v1.0-US database). This capability will then be used to achieve four high-value science and modeling objectives: (1) quantify the multiple-objective trade-offs between performance and sustainability metrics, (2) analyze historical sensitivity, vulnerability, resilience, and evolution of the FEW network with attribution to observed stresses and shocks, (3) establish the role of cities within the FEW system, and (4) provide a standards-based benchmarking assessment capability that can be used by other projects awarded under Track 1 (FEW System Modeling) and Track 3 (Research to Enable Innovative System Solutions) of this INFEWS solicitation. A public online educational tool uses this information to visualize how individual and local decisions create environmental footprints, and how those decisions create impacts throughout the food, energy, and water system.