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Climate Change has emerged as one of the grand global challenges facing humanity. The dominant anthropogenic greenhouse gas contributing to the climate change
problem, carbon dioxide (CO2), has a complex cycle through the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere. The combustion of fossil fuels (power production, transportation,
manufacturing, heating, etc) remains the largest source of anthropogenic CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere and hence, its pattern and fate in the atmosphere is of
central importance to the climate change problem. Up until very recently, the quantification of fossil fuel CO2 was understood only at coarse space and time scales.
A recent research effort, called the Vulcan Project, has greatly improved this space/time quantification resulting in source data at a resolution of less than 10
km sq./hourly at the surface of North America. By providing visual tools to examine this new, high resolution CO2 data, we can better understand the way that CO2 is
transported within the atmosphere and how it is exchanged with other components of the Earth System. We have developed interactive visual analytic tools, which
allows for easy data manipulation, analysis, and extraction. Our visualizations consist of both 2D and 3D techniques which highlight valuable features of the CO2
data. The resulting images of the system are used to communicate the data to both scientists and non-experts.
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