The Graphic User Interface (GUI) of this online tool consists of five resizable and closable panes: NORTH, WEST, EAST, CENTER, and SOUTH.
To resize a pane, click on a Pane Resizer Bar, and dragged the bar to a desirable position. To close a pane, click on the Pane Closer Button at the center of a pane separator line.
The NORTH pane has an array of graphic icons linked to the State of California and ARB homepages, and various climate change programs at ARB. The WEST pane hosts ‘Facility Search Criteria’ options. The CENTER pane is designated to visualize and analyze facilities and emissions in mapping, graphic, and tabular formats. The EAST pane is to present emissions summary data by various group factors. The SOUTH pane reveals the version of the web tool.
Users can change the GUI color scheme by clicking on the ‘Switch Theme’ button in the upper-right area. Select a color scheme from the dropdown list, colors of panes and tabs will change accordingly. Click on the ‘Revert’ button to reset the color sachem to its default settings.
Facilities and emissions are queried based on one or any combinations of the following criteria in WEST pane: Facility Name, Geographic Region, Primary Sector, Emission Year, and Emission Level of the first selected Air Pollutant. Categories of facility search criteria can be opened/closed individually by click on a particular category tab, or be opened /collapsed altogether by click on the ‘Open’ or ‘Hide’ toggle button next to the ‘Facility Search Criteria’ title.
Here are some rules that apply to the Facility Search Criteria pane:
· All facility search criteria of different categories work together in generating facility query results;
· Multiple selections are allowed for the Emission Year, Geographic Region, Primary Sector, and Air Pollutant. When none selection is entered in a category, the query will assume all possible values in the category;
· For the Geographical Region, available choices in lower categories are dictated by selections entered in upper categories. For example, if only ‘SACRAMENTO VALLEY’ is selected in the ‘Basin’, then the drop-down lists for ‘District’, ‘County’, ‘City’ and ‘Zipcode’ are all limited to the regions within the ‘SACRAMENTO VALLEY’ air basin.
· If multiple air pollutants are selected, the Emissions Level selector will only apply to the first air pollutant being selected.
· The tool instantly responds to any changes in Facility Search Criteria, and refreshes the data in the CENTER and EAST panes;
· Changes made in Facility Search Criteria are automatically synchronized among different modules of the tool. For example, any changes made in Facility Search Criteria at the ‘Maps’ module will also be reflected in the ‘Charts’, ‘Analysis’ and ‘Data’ modules when users switch between these modules.
Because of these features, the Tool offers almost unlimited possibilities to produce customized maps, charts and datasets, making emissions visualization and analysis an easy and fun thing to do.
On ‘Maps’ module, selected facilities are displayed on GoogleMaps as markers and their emissions as heatmaps. Selected facilities and associated emissions are also listed on the ‘EAST’ pane, where users can sort the table by facility names or by emissions.
Click a facility marker on the map or click a facility record in the emission summary table will open the facility information window. The facility and emissions information is grouped into various categories and present under separate tabs.
Facility tab contains the facility basic information, such as facility name, ID, address, sector and location.
GHG tab lists emissions of greenhouse gases.
Criteria tab lists emissions of criteria pollutants from the facility.
Toxic tab lists emissions of the Top 10 toxic pollutants emitted from the facility.
Risk tab lists potency weighted pounds of all toxic pollutants emitted from the facility.
CAP tab contains demographic and social-economic data in a 1-mile radius circle centered at the facility.
Trend tab summarizes facility’s annual GHG emissions of current and historical years. The row representing the selected ‘Emissions Year’ is highlighted in the table (Year 2013 in the following example).
Chart tab presents facility’s GHG emissions trend with a bar chart. The bar representing the selected ‘Emissions Year’ is highlighted in the chart (Year 2013 in the following example).
Facilities Dropdown List
The color of markers marks different facility types. Hovering mouse pointer over the ‘Facilities’ tab will show the legend of facility markers. If users click on a facility type from the dropdown list, markers representing selected facilities will bounce on the map, making it easy to locate these facilities on the map.
Map Layers Dropdown List
Beside of facilities, users can load various map layers on the map, and view facilities in a broad context of geographic regions or other useful information. The map layers are categorized into several groups:
§ Base Maps – Air District, Air Basin, County, Zip Code, Township
§ Air Monitors in California
§ Non-Attainment Areas – Ozone and PM2.5
§ CalEnvironScreen - by Census Tract (v1.0), by Zip Code (v2.0)
§ NATA 2005 – Cancer Risk, Respiration Risk, and Neurological Risk of census tracts
§ Weather & Cloud – Weather Forecast and Cloud Coverage (deprecated)
§ Transportation – Traffic, Transit, Bicycling
§ Clear Maps – unload all map layers on the map
Reset Maps Tab
When this tab is clicked, the map will be centered at and zoomed to the state of California, and the map type will be reset as the terrain map.
Group by Dropdown List
This tab provides functions to aggregate emissions by various grouping factors, such as emission year, primary sector, or geographic region. The emissions summary table is located in the EAST pane. The emissions summary table is sortable by the grouping factor or by the emissions level. The emissions summary table also interacts with the map. When a row in the summary table is clicked, facility markers in the selected category will bounce on the map. In case the grouping factor is a geographic region, a base map of the geographic region is also loaded onto the map.
Heatmap - By default, selected facilities are shown on the map with markers and their emissions with the heatmap. The heatmap combined with facility makers will help users to know not only the facility location, but also the relative emissions level from the facility. The heatmap helps to illustrate the collective emissions from clusters of facilities, and the spatial distribution of heavily impacted areas. Users have the option to show facilities with the heatmap, or the heatmap only. Click the HeatMap button on the top-right of the map, all facility markers are gone and only the heatmap remains. In the meantime, the HeatMap button becomes the Markers button. Click the Markers button will bring back the facility markers on the map.
Export Maps – Users can export the facility map as a static Google map to embed the map in other documents or websites. The static Google map can be saved as a graphic file, or a map URL to be consumed by any web browsers. The limitation to this function is that the number of facilities on the map should not exceed 85. All facilities are represented with a common generic marker to indicate its location on the static map. Other map layers are stripped off when exporting the Google maps as a static map.
The tool offers the following types of charts to present emissions from individual facilities or aggregated emissions from a group of facilities:
- Pie Chart
- Bar Chart
- Column Chart
- Tree Map
Users can switch between different chart types by clicking on the chart icons on top of the chart area. The chart type is preserved when switch between different modules. This means if you had a bar chart and then switched to other modules; it’s still a bar chart type when you switch back to the Chart module. All types of charts are sortable, editable, expandable and exportable; and the data used for creating the chart are downloadable.
- Sortable - all emissions charts except tree maps are sortable based on either category name or emission level. The following charts are sorted by the emission level.
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- Editable - all emissions charts and their elements can be edited and customized to special needs
- Expandable – all emissions charts can be drilled down to the next group level, and ultimately to the facility level
- Exportable - all emissions charts except tree maps can be exported and embedded in other documents or websites
- Downloadable – the data used to create the emissions charts can be download as csv files
Pie Chart is the default chart type when users switch from other modules to the Chart module for the first time of the session. Click on the pie chart icon to toggle between 2-dimentional and 3-dimentiondal pie charts. If more than one air pollutants are selected, only the emissions of the first selected air pollutant are used for creating the pie chart. When a row is clicked in the emissions summary table, the corresponding slice in the pie chart will be highlighted.
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When more than one air pollutants are selected, emissions of all selected air pollutants will be plotted on the bar chart. The scale of the bar chart might be dominated by the pollutant with the largest emissions; so that the emissions of other pollutants are sometimes barely noticeable on the bar chart. Click on the bar chart icon to toggle between stacked and arrayed bar charts. In case that all selected air pollutants are greenhouse gases, emissions are converted to CO2e metric tons for easy comparison on the bar chart.
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When more than one air pollutants are selected, emissions of all selected air pollutants will be plotted on the column chart. The scale of the column chart might be dominated by the pollutant with large emissions so that the emissions of other pollutants are barely noticeable on the column chart. Click on the column chart icon to toggle between stacked and arrayed column charts. In case that all selected air pollutants are greenhouse gases, emissions are converted to CO2e metric tons for easy comparison on the column chart.
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In a tree map, emissions are represented with rectangles of various sizes and colors. The size of a rectangle is directly proportional to the emissions of the entity it represents. The color of a rectangle changes from green to red as the emissions increase. Hover the mouse over a rectangle, the information of the entity represented by the rectangle will pop up.
In this module, users can conduct a multi-dimensional, over-time analysis of emissions data. Using motion bubble charts, this module provides a powerful way to visualize emissions data in five dimensions: x-axis, y-axis, size of bubble, color of bubble, and year. Users can set up the first four dimensions to represent emissions of various pollutants. An individual bubble reveals the emissions characteristics of an entity; bubbles of all entities together in motion status illustrate emissions patterns and trends. This is especially useful to explore the relationships between emissions of different pollutants, sectors, and regions. The data filtering and grouping functions are all available to this module, which means the emissions analysis can be conducted at various spatial scales and for any industrial sectors.
Adobe Flash© needs to be installed and activated to use this module. Users of Firefox web browser should realize that the outdated Flash player is blocked at the default setting for the browser. Users need to click ‘Activate Adobe Flash’ when being prompted, or update the Flash player to the latest version.
The Data module hosts a data table that contains the detailed facility information and their emissions data. As the data table might contains many rows and columns, both vertical and horizontal scroll bars are presented when needed. No paging is the default setting for the data table, but users can reset the number of rows in a page in the ‘row/page’ dropdown list. In case more than one pages are needed to accommodate all records, then the page navigation bar will appear at the bottom of the data table. The data is sortable by any columns. Click on a table header to sort the table in either ascending or descending orders. Users can download the data as a csv file by clicking on the ‘Get Data’ button above the data table.
The emissions summary table resides in EAST pane of the GUI. The table contains aggregated emissions by various group factors. The default group factor is by facility. Users can chose a different group factor to aggregate emissions by click on the ‘Group by’ dropdown list on top of the CENTER pane. The ‘Group by’ function is accessible from all modules except the ‘Help’ module. No matter the modules, the emissions summary table is always responding to changes made in the ‘Facility Search Criteria’ pane, and it summarizes emissions of all selected pollutants from the filtered facilities. The emissions summary table is sortable by either the group factor name or by the emissions level. Click on the table headers to sort the table in either ascending or descending orders. The emissions summary table also interacts with the facility maps and emission charts in CERNTER pane. In Map module, click a row in the emissions summary table will result in bouncing facility markers that correspond to the clicked row. In Charts module, click a row in the emissions summary table will result in a highlighted chart element that represents the emissions from the selected row.