The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.S. space agency, has released an “eye-popping” three-dimensional animation showing carbon dioxide emissions moving through the Earth’s atmosphere over the course of a year.
It says the 3-D visualization is “one of the most realistic views yet” of the “complex patterns in which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, decreases and moves around the globe.”
The data used to produce the visualization was collected by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite from September 2014 to September 2015. The data was then modeled and visualized by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Carbon Brief: Specifically, what questions are you hoping it will help to answer?
Dr. Lesley E. Ott [a carbon cycle scientist at Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office]: The main goal of OCO-2 and most carbon cycle modeling is to better understand the processes that control carbon sources and sinks. About 50 percent of human emissions are absorbed by plants on land and in the oceans, but scientists don’t have a good understanding of how or even where this is happening. We start by running the model with a ‘first guess’ of sources and sinks, and the data assimilation allows us to quantify how and where the model differs from the observations. Eventually, we’ll be able to use these techniques to create more accurate maps of source and sinks, and from there we can improve climate models to better predict changes in the natural carbon cycle. This analysis product is something of a mid-point. We still have a lot of work left to do to understand the carbon cycle more fully, but developing these modeling and data assimilation tools is an important advance that will help us get where we need to be.