First Name:
Gordan
Last Name:
Buckingham
Major Department:
Geography and Planning
Thesis Director:
Kathleen Schroeder
Date of Thesis:
Aug 2014
An increase in global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from anthropogenic sources is causing long term climate patterns to be altered. A more complete understanding of the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is important for the development and implementation of CO2 mitigation strategies. This paper addresses the drivers of the locations of large point sources of CO2 emissions. The spatial relationship between two primary drivers, political boundaries and water bodies, is identified and analyzed. This paper also briefly addresses some of the issues of including large point sources in gridded products of fossil fuel emissions. Large point sources of CO2 emissions are a large contributor to global CO2emissions. Available data contain an amount of uncertainty and discrepancies in the locational attributes of large point sources. If large point sources are not randomly distributed geographically, but instead are correlated with geographical features, then this information could be used to constrain the locational uncertainty within existing datasets. The study area of this paper is the contiguous United States, where the existing data are among the most accurate, but it is done as an early study to explore what could be applied internationally. Keywords: carbon dioxide, CO2, GIS,