Experts have time and again warned of the serious implications of global warming. The phenomenon is widely blamed on mankind's emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases particularly carbon dioxide, which is primarily produced by burning fossil fuels.
Environmentalists said that the world's emission of carbon dioxide need to level down and experts believe that the emission should be reduced to below 350 parts per million to mitigate the worst effects of a warming climate. Up until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the Earth's atmosphere only had 270 ppm of carbon dioxide but as of Spring 2014, it now has over 400 ppm.
In a bid to help people visualize how atmospheric carbon dioxide changes and spreads across the globe, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shared a video produced by a supercomputer model that compressed one year's worth of data into few minutes.
The simulation shows carbon dioxide swirling and shifting as the winds disperse it away from where it originates. It also demonstrates the varying levels in the global concentration of the greenhouse gas with the changing growth cycles of carbon dioxide-absorbing trees and plants that goes along season changes.
The visualization, the first to demonstrate in fine detail the amount of carbon dioxide that actually moves through the Earth's atmosphere, was produced by the supercomputer model called GEOS-5, which was created by scientists at the U.S. space agency's Goddard's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office and is part of a simulation dubbed "Nature Run," which showed that atmosphere's natural behavior between May 2005 and June 2007.
Computer models along with satellite observations help improve scientists' understanding on the processes that influence the concentration of carbon dioxide, which is considered a significant driver of climate change.
"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," said project lead scientist Bill Putman, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "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."
The simulation was run using NASA Center for Climate Simulation's (NCCS) supercomputer called Discover at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The resolution produced is about 64 times better compared with that of other global climate models.
Below is NASA's video that shows how the invisible and heat-trapping carbon dioxide travels around the globe:
