New Delhi:
Want to know in detail about the carbon dioxide that wanders in our atmosphere? Well, American space agency NASA has explained how the carbon dioxide circulates around the atmosphere of the planet Earth.
For this purpose they have used a detailed 3D visualization, to make you understand the process well.
NASA combined the data from its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite with a project belonging to the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at the Goddard Space Flight Center. It thus chronicled the movement of carbon dioxide (CO2) from September 2014 to September 2015.
The 3D visualization provides information about global carbon dioxide, which has never been seen in so detail in the past. The visualization shows how the CO2 rises and falls in the Northern Hemisphere throughout the year. It also shows the influence of continents, mountain ranges and ocean currents on weather patterns and CO2 movement; and the regional influence of highly active photosynthesis, NASA said.
Fossil fuel burning is the primary element which emits carbon dioxide which causes the Earth's current long-term warming trend.
The 3D visualisation also throws light on the advances made by scientists in understanding the processes that control the amount of carbon dioxide released into the Earth’s atmosphere and calculating its duration of stay.
With the new dataset, the scientists aim to understand the processes driving the "carbon flux" – the exchange of carbon dioxide among the atmosphere, land and ocean, Nature World News reported.
"We can't measure the flux directly at high resolution across the entire globe," Lesley Ott, a carbon cycle scientist at NASA Goddard and a member of the OCO-2 science team, said in a statement.
"We are trying to build the tools needed to provide an accurate picture of what's happening in the atmosphere and translating that to an accurate picture of what's going on with the flux. There's still a long way to go, but this is a really important and necessary step in that chain of discoveries about carbon dioxide," she added.
"It's taken us many years to pull it all together," Steven Pawson, chief of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, said in the same statement, according to Nature World News.
"The level of detail included in this dataset gives us a lot of optimism that our models and observations are beginning to give a coherent view of the carbon cycle.”
Here is the video released by NASA:
(Video courtesy: NASA Goddard)
