What is The Hestia Project™?
The Hestia Project is a global-scale collaborative project that will build a computer-based world in which all processes that emit fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) at the planetary surface can be simulated, visualized, analyzed, and used by multiple stakeholders as they engage the climate change problem.
Hestia will provide the models, data sets, and decision-support tools needed to design and implement carbon management strategies, strengthen and support basic research in climate prediction and carbon cycle science, and allow the public, decisionmakers, scientists, and industry to access detailed space-time information on fossil/industrial CO2 emissions via an intuitive, interactive, photorealistic, three-dimensional visualization of the Earth.
In short, Hestia will quantify, simulate and visualize the metabolism of global industrial economic activity.
Building on current data
The Hestia Project™ builds on a NASA/DOE-funded project called Vulcan*. Vulcan has already quantified fossil fuel CO2 in the United States at 10 km spatial resolution and hourly temporal resolution for the year 2002 with considerable sectoral detail. Hestia will take this down to the urban lanscape scale, creating a web-based tool with complete cause and effect emission linkages.
Indianapolis Case Study
With funding from the Showalter Trust and Knauf Insulation, a case study of the greater Indianapolis region is underway, providing a micro-example of what Hestia will look like. Our Indianapolis case will start with a city budget of fossil fuels based on utility accounting of electricity, refined oil products (i.e. gasoline), coal, and natural gas. This will be combined with emission factors from existing databases, which allows us to translate fuel combustion into the amount of emitted carbon dioxide. The final visualization will aim towards a dynamic environment where users can zoom and pan over portions of the city, imaging sub portions of carbon dioxide emissions by sector, sub-sector and area.
The Hestia Strategy
We will build Hestia in a parallel, multipath fashion. We will simultaneously attempt city-based Hestia examples, downscaling of Vulcan in the U.S., testing remote sensing algorithms over the state of California, building a powerful cyber infrastructure, and forming partnerships with researchers in other parts of the world such that Hestia can begin expanding beyond the United States.
Our fundraising strategy is similarly multi-faceted. We anticipate building funding relationships with industry, foundations, and federal/state agency partners as each of these funding sources have particular emphases consistent with their interests and constituent base. Intellectual partnerships are now being explored and Hestia will require expertise across a variety of academic disciplines and a variety of institutions. Aside from the involvement of University investigators, partnership with national laboratories and the technology industry are needed.
* NASA grant: NNG05GG12G