American researchers have used a neat trick to produce a map of carbon dioxide emissions which is 100 times more detailed than previous efforts.

Instead of using monthly state data on carbon dioxide the team behind the new system – called Vulcan – went to data on carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and other air pollution. This is collected all over the US on an hourly basis. With a knowledge of atmospheric chemistry and a bit of number crunching you can work out from these pollutants how much carbon dioxide was probably around.

This video shows various outputs from Vulcan:

And the new system has thrown up a few surprises.

“For example, we’ve been attributing too many emissions to the northeastern United States, and it’s looking like the southeastern US is a much larger source than we had estimated previously,” says project leader Kevin Gurney, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University (press release).

According to the NY Times Dot Earth blog a global version of Vulcan, called the Hestia Project, is in the works. (More on Hestia.)

Wired notes, “Now, given the opposition of the Southeast’s congressional delegations to climate-change action, I’d like to see the new emissions map matched up with House and Senate districts.”

Vulcan is funded by NASA and the DOE. There’s no peer review paper on it yet but it has been presented at a few conferences and you can read those presentations here.