NASA Visualizes Earth's CO2 Emissions With a Cool Animation

While many people understandably associate digital animation and 3D simulations solely with entertainment, it's no secret that the technology used by digital artists to create shaders and visual effects is also leveraged by scientists worldwide to better understand and visualize various processes in their respective fields of study.

Case in point, a captivating simulation recently unveiled by NASA itself, which visualizes the movement of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere from January to March 2020 and illustrates how and where the gas was emitted and how it traveled across our planet. According to the agency, the majority of emissions depicted in the simulation originated from sources like power plants and large urban areas, along with forest fires in Central Africa and South America.

To create the simulation, NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio employed the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS), a high-resolution weather reanalysis model powered by supercomputers, which represents atmospheric conditions, including storm systems, cloud formations, and other natural events, in a digital format.

For this project, the researchers collected billions of data points from ground observations and satellite instruments and uploaded them to the system, allowing GEOS to generate the showcased animation, boasting a resolution more than 100 times greater than that of a typical weather model.

As for the neat pulsing effect in the simulation, NASA explains that the primary reasons for this phenomenon are that fires have a clear day-night cycle, flaring up during the day and calming down at night, along with the absorption and release of carbon dioxide by trees and plants as they photosynthesize.

"Plants take up carbon dioxide during the day as they photosynthesize and then release it at night through respiration," the agency comments. "Notice that much of the pulsing occurred in regions with lots of trees, like mid- or high-latitude forests. And since the data were taken during the Southern Hemisphere summer, you see more pulsing in the tropics and South America, where it was the active growing season."

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