The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the transportation sector accounts for approximately 27% of all greenhouse gas emissions annually in the United States, and emissions from road transportation — driven by carbon-creating internal combustion vehicles — account for a large majority of that.
“In particular, we were able to estimate the average annual daily traffic on individual road segments in urban areas and combined this with localized estimates of vehicle emissions factors to produce a total emissions estimate,” explained Marisa Hughes, the assistant program manager for Environmental Resilience in APL’s Research and Exploratory Development Mission Area.
Then the team realized there was another way to address the challenge, Hughes said. APL had experience in mapping patterns of life for the Intelligence Community on a project called, where experts mapped out land use and structures, and used satellite data from different times of day to understand and differentiate between similar-looking structures, like office buildings versus apartment complexes.