From the “if the government won’t visualize it, a climate skeptic will” department.
Guest essay by Erik Swenson
In July of 2014, NASA launched its most advanced carbon dioxide monitoring satellite, The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2). The first OCO burned up on launch. There has been a lot of anticipation regarding the data from this instrument. However, over a year after it launch, there has been little public information presented about its results. The only data made available by NASA has been images showing CO2 from an AGU14 session.
These images are shown below.
Figure 1: NASA-provided OCO-2 data for Oct 1 – Nov 11, 2014
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/mainco2mappia18934.jpg
Figure 2 NASA-provided OCO-2 data for Nov 21 – Dec 27, 2014
Source: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011788/F5a.png
Back in May 2015, there was a release of some visualized data showing mixing ratios of CO2 over the oceans:
For some reason, NASA has not chosen to publish any recent updates of the OCO-2 satellite data. Many people are interested in the data from OCO-2, but have not been able to access the information. NASA has now provided access to the raw data from OCO-2, but the data is in the HDF file format. No common commercial programs such as Excel can access this data in this form.
I have created a program to parse this data, and attempt to graph it in a form that closely matches the output of the NASA images. The data is available from 9/20/2014 – 9/22/2015 as of this writing. I have generated the plots in approximately 6 week intervals. It takes about that much data to cover most of the globe with observational data. You can see how the orbit path is from this NASA visualization story:
A few implementation notes.
The data from each sample is put into an array. Each point is added to the array as a circular blob. The center point of the circle has a weight of 1 for the averaging function. The remaining points in the circle are weighted in a decreasing manner from the center. This choice is based on the images from NASA which show circular artifacts.
All of the images use the same min/max scale of 380 – 415 ppm. This does not give the best dynamic range for each image, but it does present a good range over all of the images.
The NASA images are chopped beyond 60 degrees N and S latitude. I have chosen to show whatever data is there.
All data points are plotted from the OCO-2-Lite files regardless of warn_level. Warn_level is used to judge the quality of the sample. The OCO-2-Lite files say they are the “high-quality” samples, so I chose to use them all.
The data used for these images is from the OCO-2-Lite v7 data set. It can be accessed here:
https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov/#mission=OCO-2
Finished visualizations
The data here is presented without comment. I will leave it to others to decide what this data means. So, without further ado – here is the data I have processed.
Figure 3: Processed data from Oct 1 – Nov 11, 2014
Figure 3 is an attempt to match the first NASA image from Oct 1 – Nov 11, 2014 to see how closely my algorithm matches. Note that NASA has adjusted the data set multiple times since the release of the NASA image. The current version is v7. I am not sure what changes have been made in the data.
Figure 4 : Processed data from Nov 16 – Dec 31, 2014
Figure 5 : Processed data from Jan 1 – Feb 15, 2015
Figure 6 : Processed data from Feb 16 – Mar 31, 2015
Figure 7 : Processed data from Apr 1 – May 15, 2015
Figure 8 : Processed data from May 16 – Jun 30, 2015
Figure 9 : Processed data from Jul 1 – Aug 15, 2015
Figure 10 : Processed data from Aug 16- Sep 12, 2015
UPDATE: Eric Swenson provides this map in comments showing CO2 over the entire year from From September 2014 to October 2015 – Anthony
Also, reader “edimbukvarevic” provides this map of anthropogenic CO2 emissions for comparison:
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Is there a way to do subtractive analysis on the monthly/quarterly data to see if there are any co2 hotspots
I see that http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/OCO2DataCenter/ are releasing 12 months of data from Tuesday onwards…
Anthony, the annual plot Erik provided in comments is really the bottom line here. Could you consider adding it to the article?
Erik, thanks for the work on this, I didn’t even realise that data was available publicly.
The high levels in the far North Altantic is quite surprising but this obviously needs some verificaiton before anyone gets too excited about possible explanations and interpretations.
Is it possilbe to extract a regional average and compare to terrestrail based data for somewhere in that region?
Mosher’s point number 5 was brilliant.
Not to mention deep.
You guys should have seen it before he made the adjustments!
🙂
#5 is his personal best that I have ever seen.
I can see why NASA has not been advertising this OCO2 satellite data, as it is just not telling the story that government wants. The hemisphere that is enjoying summer seems to show less overall CO2 levels. This is most likely due to hungry plant life sucking up the life-giving CO2. Trees cannot get enough of this valuable substance and we are doing our bit to give it to them, small though our contribution is. Meanwhile, separately, but not unconnectedly, Dr. David Evans is hacking away at Warmist Theory and Climate Models at JoNova.
We need more data and time to make sense of it. Southern Ocean a major sink? with ice on the surface? Svalbard and the Faeroes? High CO2 in the Western Amazon? What, fires? Lots of logging means CO2 absorption then export. Is it “smearing” from sources?
Cold oceans quit taking up CO2 when sea forms. Is the data over time? At several per second for some of it? CO2 from Alaska and the Yukon drifting Southeast?
I will look more but something seems strange.
Deforestation adds more CO2 than burning fossil fuels but the latter is more useful for political and commercial agendas.
Mr. Layman here.
What I find most intriguing is, now that NASA has a satellite to measure CO2 emissions, the data is difficult to access. It’s not like the data has anything to with the location of ISIS cells or Russian and Chinese missile bases.
The data has to do with the reason we should surrender ourselves to climate models.
A number of models are nice to look at but are artificially enhanced.
I am impressed. Using the dates on those maps, I come to the astounding conclusion that people burn fossil fuels to keep warm in winter. Who wudda thunk it??
I see plenty of spots where the CO2 level seems to change by 5% throughout the year, and thus associated feedbacks would be changing as well…show me that it doesn’t matter.
So now take the data and along with other known data (population centers, coal plants etc) attempt to determine (model) and plot:
A. Where CO2 is produced
To then determine:
B. Where it is absorbed
Without a full global dataset I guess that’s not possible though. Oh, and it’s a model. Meh
Not sure about describing the European Commission’s EDGAR stuff as a “map of anthropogenic CO2 emissions”. Whole lot of modelling in there by the look of it.
April showers bring May flowers. All those computations and algorithms to tell me something my mother told me when I was just gaining an ability to comprehend.
This data is akin to an enormous Christmas present for a homogeniser.
Thanks for sharing, Erik Swenson.
This is very good work; OCO2 is becoming a visual data source too.
case is closed CO2 in no way effects climate change or global average temperature.
Rossby waves due to a weak solar cycle a clear culprit for current “extreme” weather events. If they can even be classified as extreme events. This nino is turning out to be a widely distributed event due to those same Rossby waves.
For some reason, NASA has not chosen to publish any recent updates of the OCO-2 satellite data. Many people are interested in the data from OCO-2, but have not been able to access the information.
Well, of course we could expect this … how else can NASA make fudging adjustments to data to fit Obama’s climate change agenda, when the data does not fit the IPCC’s mantra?
Regarding: “Why are the poles excluded?” as asked by a few.
OCO-2 is the latest member of the 5 A-train satellites and follows in a retrograde polar orbit of 98.2 degrees. This leaves the area above ~83 degrees unobserved (similar for the South pole). Source: NASA fact sheet and Wikipedia
Howard, what is the (local) time of day of the satellite observations, and does it remain constant throughout the year? There is some pretty weird shit going down in the southern oceans just after their winter solstice.
I’m trying, and failing, to make sense of it at the moment.
michael
look for “A-train (satellite constellation)” at wikipedia. The first satellite of the A-Train crosses the equator at ~1:30pm solar time daily. Lots more links there for the curious. I suggest anyone looking at these NASA OCO-2 depictions read this short paper http://atrain.nasa.gov/publications/OCO.pdf “Science observations will be collected at all latitudes where the solar zenith angle is less than 85°.” If the terms solar time and solar zenith are confusing use wikipedia or find and astronomy club nearby via meetup.com and ask there. Have fun.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/modis-10.html
watch the video
compare to figures rendered by willis
Not a lot of surprises above – the following was posted in 2008:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/17/the-co2-temperature-link/#comment-67041
Hi Anna,
Here is NOAA’s data for monthly global CO2. I’m not sure if this is exactly what you want – it’s a result of several measurement points around the globe, and results are a bit less than those at Mauna Loa. Data goes back to 1980 and takes a few months to arrive – the latest month available as of now is September 2008.
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_gl.txt
You can copy the data into Excel, then use “Data>Text to Columns”; then insert a “decimal year” column, and run an Excel x-y plot. Or you can go to my paper and spreadsheet, somewhat dated now, at
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf
and
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRaeFig5b.xls
To see the large, attenuating natural annual variation in atmospheric CO2 from North to South, run the same plot for CO2 data at Barrow, Mauna Loa, Samoa and South Pole. Run it all on the same graph, and then just wonder at the stunning beauty of this data.
Barrow CO2
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/brw/brw_01C0_mm.co2
Mauna Loa CO2
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/mlo/mlo_01C0_mm.co2
American Samoa
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/smo/smo_01C0_mm.co2
South Pole CO2
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/spo/spo_01C0_mm.co2
Happy Holidays to all!
Allan
________________________________________________________
Hi Ferdinand and Richard,
I think it is safe to say that Ferdinand is convinced that the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 is definitely caused by fossil fuel combustion, while Richard and I regard this point as debatable.
Can we for the purposes of this note focus on what we agree upon.
Would you both agree that:
1. There is NO convincing evidence that global warming is driven primarily by increased atmospheric CO2.
2. There is significant evidence that global warming is NOT primarily driven by atmospheric CO2.
3. Global temperature increases and decreases are natural and cyclical.
4. Spending tens of trillions of dollars on CO2 abatement is a huge waste of scarce global resources.
Best regards, Allan
________________________________________________________
Thank you Anna,
I have examined the 15fps AIRS data animation of global CO2 at
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/carbonDioxideSequence2002_2008_at15fps.mp4
It is difficult to see the impact of humanity in this impressive display of nature’s power.
Still, as Ferdinand points out, annual CO2 concentration keeps increasing at ~1.5ppm/year – even as CO2 fluctuates by up to 16ppm/year in its natural seasonal sawtooth pattern.
Questions for discussion by all:
1. IF atmospheric CO2 declines in the coming years contemporaneous with global cooling (or soon thereafter), what does this prove, if anything?
2. IF atmospheric CO2 continues to increase in the coming years contemporaneous with global cooling, what does this prove, if anything?
3. If CO2 drives temperature as the IPCC alleges, how is it that the only signal apparent in the data is that CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months? See
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf
4. Is the aforementioned ~9 month lag in CO2 after temperature consistent with the ~600 year lag in CO2 after temperature observed in ice core data?
Regards, Allan
So you have high CO2 concentrations in North Atlantic, a cold water blob in the same place and Iceland just below going through the biggest continuous volcanic eruption in centuries. It kind of all comes together.
Hi Anthony – do you believe me now?
I got this far in January 2008.
Best, Allan 🙂
Presentation of Evidence Suggesting Temperature Drives Atmospheric CO2 more than CO2 Drives Temperature
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/13/presentation-of-evidence-suggesting-temperature-drives-atmospheric-co2-more-than-co2-drives-temperature/#comment-1963448
June 13, 2015
Note: I present this for discussion, I have no opinion on its validity – Anthony Watts
Guest essay by Allan MacRae
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/13/presentation-of-evidence-suggesting-temperature-drives-atmospheric-co2-more-than-co2-drives-temperature/#comment-1963448
Hi Shane – suggest you show your students this beautiful animation (below) and see what they think of it.
Oceans are a factor, but Northern Hemisphere terrestrial life dominates the water cycle and the CO2 cycle.
Best, Allan
[Excerpt from my 2015 paper]
The natural seasonal amplitude in atmospheric CO2 ranges up to ~16ppm in the far North (at Barrow Alaska) to ~1ppm at the South Pole, whereas the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 is only ~2ppm. This seasonal “CO2 sawtooth” is primarily driven by the Northern Hemisphere landmass, which has a much greater land area than the Southern Hemisphere. CO2 falls during the Northern Hemisphere summer, due primarily to land-based photosynthesis, and rises in the late fall, winter and early spring as biomass decomposes.
Significant temperature-driven CO2 solution and exsolution from the oceans also occurs.
See the beautiful animation at
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/carbonDioxideSequence2002_2008_at15fps.mp4
In this enormous CO2 equation, the only signal that is apparent is that dCO2/dt varies approximately contemporaneously with temperature, and CO2 clearly lags temperature.
CO2 also lags temperature by about 800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.
I suggest with confidence that the future cannot cause the past.
I suggest that temperature drives CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. This does not preclude other drivers of CO2 such as fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, etc.
**************************
Allan MacRae:
I ‘believed’ you years before 2008; e.g. see
Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005).
Also, Salby among others reached the same tentative conclusion.
I suspect your views will become mainstream as real data becomes available. OCO-2 is providing data that may enable firm conclusions instead of the championed unsubstantiated assertions that have dominated the subject to date.
Richard
Hello Richard.
Great to hear from you and thank you for your kind comments. Yes, Salby and Humlum et al have since reached similar conclusions regarding dCO2/dt vs. Temperature and.CO2-lags-Temperature in the modern data record.
I agree with you – these concepts will become mainstream, probably within a decade or so, now that the latest CO2 satellites are up.
My greatest concern now is imminent global cooling and a resulting increase in Winter Mortality rates. Please see the recent paper by Joe d’Aleo and me at
https://friendsofsciencecalgary.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/cold-weather-kills-macrae-daleo-4sept2015-final.pdf
I am particularly concerned about Britain, where Excess Winter Mortality Rates are more than double those of Canada, and foolish green energy schemes have driven up energy costs and reduced electrical grid reliability.
Here are my Conclusions from my June 2015 reprise of my 2008 paper.
Best personal regards, Allan
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/13/presentation-of-evidence-suggesting-temperature-drives-atmospheric-co2-more-than-co2-drives-temperature/#comment-1963448
Observations and Conclusions:
1. Temperature, among other factors, drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. The rate of change dCO2/dt is closely correlated with temperature and thus atmospheric CO2 LAGS temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record
2. CO2 also lags temperature by ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.
3. Atmospheric CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales.
4. CO2 is the feedstock for carbon-based life on Earth, and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are clearly CO2-deficient. CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.
5. Based on the evidence, Earth’s climate is insensitive to increased atmospheric CO2 – there is no global warming crisis.
6. Recent global warming was natural and irregularly cyclical – the next climate phase following the ~20 year pause will probably be global cooling, starting by ~2020 or sooner.
7. Adaptation is clearly the best approach to deal with the moderate global warming and cooling
experienced in recent centuries.
8. Cool and cold weather kills many more people than warm or hot weather, even in warm climates. There are about 100,000 Excess Winter Deaths every year in the USA and about 10,000 in Canada.
9. Green energy schemes have needlessly driven up energy costs, reduced electrical grid reliability and contributed to increased winter mortality, which especially targets the elderly and the poor.
10. Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the lifeblood of modern society. When politicians fool with energy systems, real people suffer and die. That is the tragic legacy of false global warming alarmism.
Allan MacRae, Calgary, June 12, 2015
The cult of CAGW ignores observations and analysis that disproves their silly, pathetic Bern model and disproves CAGW.
The majority of the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last 50 years is due to natural sources and the majority of the warming in the last 150 years is due to solar cycle changes.
If that assertion is correct the planet will now significantly cool and atmospheric CO2 levels will drop.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
William,
If you refer to the work of Humlum e.a., please also refer to the comments:
Here the highlights of the comment by Mark Richardson:
• Humlum et al.’s conclusion of natural CO2 rise since 1980 not supported by the data
• Their use of differentiated time series removes long term contributions.
• This conclusion violates conservation of mass.
• Further analysis shows that the natural contribution is indistinguishable from zero.
• The calculated human contribution is sufficient to explain the entire rise.
The new chart is amazing. For the last year the boreal forests, and the high North Atlantic, are huge net sources even as the planet greens up. It is hard to see how this could happen every year. It is also hard to see any new sinks, required by the IPCC “mass balance” explanation of the huge difference between human emissions and net atmospheric CO2 increase.
Mother Nature has good years and bad years. This chart shows that sources and sinks do not match in any predictable way, and highlights the unlikelihood of human emissions causing the atmospheric CO2 increase without any correlation of the amounts involved Whatsoever.
Those who claim a balance would have to explain this chart, going to involve lots of hand-waving…
Michael,
How do you explain the following graph, if human emissions were not the cause of the increase?
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em2.jpg
I know, Bart has a alternative which is theoretically possible but practically impossible: it violates Henry’s law for the solubility of CO2 in seawater and violates about all other observations…
The variability is in the net sinks, not in the main source, which is humans. If the OCO-2 satellite can spot the human emissions depends of its resolution: human emissions are ~4.5 ppmv/year or 0.01 ppmv/day, blown in the wind… Even if concentrated in some 10% of the earth’s surface, it will be a hell of a job to detect that…
Ferdinand.
I would like to see the underlying data behind your plot and how it has been assessed and in particular how much is based upon hard empirical measurement. To me, the plot looks to be the artefact of imagination, possibly based upon modelled assumptions.
I consider that plot to be rather misleading since carbon sinks have clearly significantly expanded since the 1950s and this is why the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 is considerably less than the CO2 being emitted by man. The greening of the Sehel is but one obvious example.
Further it will always be difficult to tell whether an increase in atmospheric CO2 is down to the sinks contracting, or natural sources of CO2 increasing, especially as some sinks are sources of CO2. Take the oceans for example. The oceans are carbon sinks, but they also outgas considerable CO2. When the oceans are warm (such as El Ninos), the oceans outgas more CO2 than when they are cool (say a La Nina).
Confirmation for that is that one can clearly see the 1998 El Nino in the red plot. Accordingly, I do not see that one can maintain that “The variability is in the net sinks, not in the main source…” The main sources of CO2 are all natural. Manmade emissions are a very small addition on top of the main natural sources.
Richard,
CO2 emissions inventory from:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html up to 2007
and more detailed after 2008 from:
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=90&pid=44&aid=8
All countries are obliged to give their CO2 emissions from energy consumption in the same way to make a comparison possible. See the notes at:
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/docs/IPMNotes.html
That is for the emissions part. In general more underestimated than overestimated…
I used the Mauna Loa data for the increase in the atmosphere, but one can use any of the 10 other NOAA sites or any of the other 60 non-NOAA sites where CO2 is measured in open atmosphere with a minimum of local contamination. All stations show the same CO2 increase over the years with some lags with altitude and latitude, mainly between the SH and the NH:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends.jpg
Up to date data can be found via the carbon tracker:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/
The CO2 equipment is rigorously calibrated each hour with three calibration mixtures and each 25th hour with an extra calibration mixture. CO2 measurements are one of the best controlled and maintained measurements we have and one can only hope that one day the thermometers were maintained the same way… See:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
The sinks are simply the difference between emissions and what is found in the atmosphere. No tricks or “model” there. As no carbon can be destroyed or created (except 14C of course…), the difference between what goes in and what is retained must go somewhere, no matter how large the natural ins and outs during a year were, all what counts is the difference at the end of a full seasonal cycle. Which is more sink than source over every year of the past 55 years…
How that is distributed between the main players (oceans and vegetation) is a good question, which was solved by looking at the δ13C and O2 changes over the seasons and the years.
Seasonal, (extra-tropical NH) vegetation is dominant, as CO2 and δ13C change in opposite ways, as can be seen in the OCO-2 plots too: for higher temperatures, less CO2 (and higher δ13C).
Over 1-3 years (tropical) vegetation is dominant too, but opposite to the seasonal changes: warmer ocean temperatures give changes in rain patterns and too high temperatures/drought in the Amazon, where a lot of debris is used as food for bacteria + forest fires during an El Niño.
Over longer periods, the oceans are dominant as can be seen in the small changes in δ13C over glacial and interglacial periods.
Thus the main variability in the above plot is in the sink capacity of the (tropical) forests, which even may turn into short-term sources with higher temperatures (but still nature as a whole remains a net sink). That doesn’t influence the trend, which is certainly not from vegetation, as that is a net sink for all periods longer than 3 years.
Engelbeen,
The chemistry of the oceans is complex. Mother Nature does not do the same thing every year despite your repeated insistence that She does. When I had my house in Michigan, some years it took me a week to dump all the leaves over the edge onto the river bank, some years it took me two weeks. I don’t have to explain it, I only point out the lack of correlation. Clearly something else is also involved, and there are many candidate processes.
Michael,
I don’t think that nature is static, but the figures show that the variability in net result of all natural carbon cycles is surprisingly small: not more than +/- 1 ppmv around the trend of +70 ppmv in the past 55 years.
Maybe due to the fact that the influence of temperature on oceans and vegetation in general is opposite to each other (anyway over the seasons).
There is a very good correlation between temperature variability and CO2 rate of change variability, but that is only about the +/- 1 ppmv “noise”, not with the trend, where human emissions and increase in the atmosphere show a perfect match:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1960_cur.jpg,