Battling global warming is a worldwide problem, so what better place to understand it than on a worldwide satellite map?
Project Vulcan climate data is added to the global mapping program
Google on Friday released a “plug-in” download for its Google Earth showing which states and counties generate the largest volume of greenhouse gases.
The plug-in relies on data from Project Vulcan, an effort to measure the impact of global warming led by Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor at Purdue University, according to a company blog post.
The overlay shows which U.S. states and counties have the highest and lowest emission rates per capita. It is also identifies the sources of those emissions: driving, home heating, etc.
“The results produced by Project Vulcan are publicly available, but they are not easy to analyze for a non-scientist, so during my 20% time at Google I have created dynamic maps of the Vulcan data,” said Site Reliability Engineer Simon Ilyushchenko.
Google engineers get to spend 20 percent of their time on projects of their own design.
Find the download here.
