A captivating video from NASA unveils the patterns of carbon dioxide (CO2) circulating in our atmosphere using the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model, from January to March 2020. This model relies on supercomputers to simulate the atmosphere using data from satellite instruments, including Terra satellite’s MODIS and the Suomi-NPP satellite’s VIIRS, along with ground-based observations.
Lesley Ott, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, emphasized the significance of this visualization for both policymakers and scientists: “As policymakers and as scientists, we’re trying to account for where carbon comes from and how that impacts the planet. You see here how everything is interconnected by these different weather patterns.”
Human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes, have dramatically increased atmospheric CO2 levels since the Industrial Revolution. The concentration has surged from approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) to over 400 ppm. In 2022 alone, the United States released 6,343 million metric tons of CO2, as reported by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
The video showcases CO2 emissions from major fossil fuel-burning centers such as cities and power stations across China, the United States, and South Asia. In contrast, in Africa and South America, CO2 primarily emanates from fires related to deforestation and controlled burns. These CO2 plumes pulse with the days, intensifying during daylight and calming at night due to the natural cycle of plant photosynthesis and fire activity.
Ott reflected on the visualization’s revelations: “We had a feeling we were going to see plume structures and things that we’ve never been able to see when we do these coarser resolution simulations. Just seeing how persistent the plumes were and the interaction of the plumes with weather systems, it was tremendous.”
Despite the appearance of CO2 clustering in some regions while being sparse in others, the gas is present everywhere in varying concentrations.
AJ Christensen, a senior visualization designer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, clarified: “We didn’t want people to get the impression that there was no carbon dioxide in these sparser regions. But we also wanted to really highlight the dense regions because that’s the interesting feature of the data. We were trying to show that there’s a lot of density over New York and Beijing.”
This visualization underscores the immense scale of human-induced CO2 emissions and their role in driving climate change. Greenhouse gases, including CO2, water vapor, methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), trap heat in the atmosphere by absorbing and re-radiating the sun’s infrared radiation back to Earth. This process warms the planet, affecting weather patterns and leading to more extreme weather events, melting polar ice caps, and rising sea levels.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report confirms that human activities have “unequivocally caused warming,” with 2023 marked as the hottest year on record.
“What’s happening is you’re stitching together this very complex array of models to make use of the different satellite data, and that’s helping us fill in this broad puzzle of all the processes that control carbon dioxide. The hope is that if we understand greenhouse gases really well today, we’ll be able to build models that better predict them over the next decades or even centuries,” Ott said.