NASA has released an ultra-high resolution video from their computer models that can give us a stunning view of how carbon dioxide travels and builds over the course of a year. (Scroll to read on...)
[Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/K. Sharghi]
The carbon dioxide visualization was produced by a computer model called GEOS-5, created by scientists at NASA Goddard's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, and shows the carbon cycle for the year 2006.
"While the presence of carbon dioxide has dramatic global consequences, it's fascinating to see how local emission sources and weather systems produce gradients of its concentration on a very regional scale," Bill Putman, lead scientist on the project from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a recent statement. "Simulations like this, combined with data from observations, will help improve our understanding of both human emissions of carbon dioxide and natural fluxes across the globe."
This simulation has been revealed at the same time that NASA is making an updated "post beta" version of their "Nature Run" simulation tech available to the scientific community.
Nature Run can not only illustrate real data on atmospheric conditions and the emission of greenhouse gases, but also simulate winds, clouds, water vapor, and airborne particles such as dust, black carbon, sea salt, and emissions from industry and volcanoes.
"We're very excited to share this revolutionary dataset with the modeling and data assimilation community," Putman added, "and we hope the comprehensiveness of this product and its ground-breaking resolution will provide a platform for research and discovery throughout the Earth science community."
The resolution of the current model - as seen above - is approximately 64 times greater than that of your typical global climate models. However, it's best not to start dreaming of making your own emission videos anytime soon. To craft these visualizations, scientists ran the program on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation's Discover supercomputer cluster at Goddard Space Flight Center.