NASA captures images of ‘painful’ cloud over Earth

The effects of the gas include severe storms, wildfires, heat waves and rising sea levels. Human activities, which release carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming, according to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Data visualizations help people understand how Earth systems work and can help scientists find patterns in large data sets. “This is a very exciting time for climate scientists,” said climate scientist Leslie Ott at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The challenge for AJ Christensen, the lead visualization designer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who was responsible for the map, was to show the variations in the density of this invisible gas.

“We didn’t want people to get the impression that there’s no CO2 in these scattered areas. We really wanted to highlight the dense areas 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,” he said in a post on the US space agency’s website.

The hope is that if we understand greenhouse gases well today, we will be able to build models that predict them better in the decades or even centuries to come. “This is a very exciting time for us,” said Leslie Ott of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a post on NASA’s website..

How was the map made?

The map was developed by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. Which uses the GEOS model, which stands for Goddard Earth Observing System.