The Hestia Project

THE HESTIA PROJECT

The Hestia Project™ is revolutionizing how the urban areas approach and interact with the climate change problem. The Hestia system quantifies all fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the scale of buildings, streets and factories for entire urban areas. Hestia can provide stakeholders an unprecedented opportunity to design and implement carbon management strategies, verify emissions reductions, strengthen and support basic research in climate prediction and carbon cycle science, and allow the public, decisionmakers, scientists and industry access to detailed space-time information on fossil/industrial energy consumption and CO2 emissions. All this is done via an intuitive, interactive, photorealistic, three-dimensional visualization of an urban area. And work is ongoing to embed these systems into formal urban planning models and processes.

The Hestia Project™ builds on a NASA/DOE/NSF-funded project called Vulcan. Vulcan has quantified fossil fuel CO2 in the United States at sub-county spatial resolution and hourly temporal resolution for multiple years with considerable sectoral/fuel/process detail. Version 2.2 (CY2002) is available now, but a version 3.0 (CY2010-CY2015) will be available in early 2019.

Hestia has been built for four urban areas with additional urban areas under construction. The four urban areas with completed Hestia results are: Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, the Los Angeles Basin. More information and data downloads are available here. Hestia is now one part of larger projects in each of these urban areas including the INFLUX Project (Indianapolis) and the Megacities Carbon Project (Los Angeles).

The Hestia Project is led by Dr. Kevin Robert Gurney and a team of researchers at Northern Arizona University. 

THE HESTIA TEAM
Kevin Robert Gurney
Professor
School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, NAU
kevin.gurney@nau.edu

Jianming Liang
Postdoctoral Researcher
School of Life Sciences, ASU

Terry Song
Graduate Student
School of Life Sciences, ASU

Geoffrey Roest
Postdoctoral Researcher
School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems; NAU

PAST TEAM MEMBERS (our Hestia graduates!)

Risa Patarasuk
Postdoctoral Scholar
School of Life Sciences, ASU

Darragh O'Keeffe
Graduate student
School of Sustainability, ASU

Preeti Rao
Postdoctoral Scholar
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA

Yuyu Zhou
Postdoctoral Scholar
Purdue University

Maya Hutchins
Graduate student
School of Life Sciences, ASU

Jianhua Huang
Graduate student
School of Life Sciences, ASU
now at VISA, Austin, TX

Hestia includes the following collaborators:

Purdue University
Benes Bedrich

Reel(Science)Thing
Suzanna Remec