Following Carbon Dioxide Through the Atmosphere
Carbon dioxide plays a significant role in trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. The gas is released from human activities like burning fossil fuels, and the concentration of carbon dioxide moves and changes through the seasons.
Using observations from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite, scientists developed a model of the behavior of carbon in the atmosphere from September 1, 2014 to August 31, 2015.
Scientists can use models like this one to better understand and predict where concentrations of carbon dioxide could be especially high or low, based on activity on the ground.
It is all a matter of parameters…18 ppmv in differentiation, does not seem to amount to anything greater than the amount of CO2 expelled in the breath typing this word…hm. But it does seem to cloud the waters…speaking of waters…what about…aw forget about it.
Interesting little vidware. I would like to see them dial down the values to 350–393, so we can see all the places with the lower concentrations. Sometimes on nullschool, I see values -30 or -40 ppm lower than the Keeling curve values.
I am also,very interested in the humidity measurements that go along with this. There has to be some logic in the algorithm structure that removes the water vapor from the calc.
I’d also like to see it with 3 visualizations simultaneously…from above the equator, and the two poles, so we can see the CO2 slosh as the troposphere depth changes, and the gas moves to the stratosphere.
I can dream, eh?
Wanna bet this was cooked up special for AlGore movie & tour GK
Yes, I get the drift that they were planning to double down on this after the election anyway, but now there’s some desperation showing.
So is the next Dicaprio production by NASA going to attempt to model the direct effects of these CO2 concentrations on the local atmospheric temps at the various altitudes?
Let’s see the same model for water vapor.
Funny, they obviously have the capacity to show us geographically just where is CO2 being sourced and sinked but instead hide those bits behind “amazing” graphics.
I think it’s pretty clear that delineating the sources and sinks would disconnect from their agenda.
“PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT LAND BEHIND THE CURTAIN!”
Shouldn’t over say 400PPM be colour green for all the good it will do for the planet ?
Red seems to indicate angry or hot .
Maybe I’m jumping to a huge and unjustified conclusion here, when I repeat Donald’s words-
Its A Hoax.
Its a complete and utter farce. A very bad joke. Total garbage. Junk.
They have spent ?? much $$$ on this satellite and after all the time its been flying, they come up with that.
Pretty pictures out of a computer model. And gullible stupid people are swallowing that.
Who are the bigger clowns here, us or them?
Star Trek technology does not yet exist and yet they think many people believe it does and produce this cr4p – eye candy straight out of an Avatar movie.
If the greenhouse Effect is so pronounced, so easily detected by everybody, why not measure it from the ground? Just as me or you might measure albedo with 2 back-to-back solar cells, why not construct a Down Welling Radiation Meter (tuned to the wavelength of CO2 (15 micron?)) and actually measure the Down Welling Radiation? Compare the upwelling with the downwelling. Easy
Would that not tell you the amount of CO2 above your head?
Why not just get onto ebay, buy a CO2 meter and put in your garden, airport, town, city, farm, forest wherever.
Why not build them into weather stations like all the personal weather stations linked together by Wunderground? They come in a $4000 so an extra $100 for a CO2 meter is nothing
Why not fly meters on weather balloons, or even book a bit of space on the 10s of 1000s of aircraft that take off and land every day?
Why not any of those things? Coz they will demonstrate that the Emperor is stark bollock naked.
Say it again Donald, louder this time – some folks seem a bit deaf.
How many times does it have to be said that you can’t trap heat?
Your question is upside down. There is no need to say that.
What is weird in engineers is the consistent need to try to use exact language where it is not applicable; like pointing out strawberry is not a berry by a given definition. Most of us try to understand what is meant by trapping heat. Some nerds do it other way around, they try to find a definition of trapping and heat which don’t work for the purpose.
Additional CO2 ceteris paribus add to surface temperature. How much, don’t know. We call that ‘trapping heat’ but making air mean temp warmer would be as good.
Blankets do. Also pullovers too, and sock. Yeah socks.
If you keep your eyes on the dates on the bottom left corner, you see the northern hemisphere turn from a scary, ominous, doom-threatening red in the winter to a nice soothing, swimming-pool blue by July-August.
In other words, those forests are doing their job, photosynthesizing away like mad in the growing season. I suppose they will keep on doing their job as long as they don’t get cut down to feed “biomass” generating stations.
As other commenters have noted, the range of CO2 concentrations from scary, ominous, doom-threatening red to nice soothing blue is only from 390 to 408 ppm
Also, if you pause it to look at the underlying map, the biggest mass of scary red is in the Arctic. This is a bit contrary to the implied message that it’s all our fault, because most fossil fuel burning is in what we used to call the temperate zone (in Newspeak that’s the “temporarily-temperate-but-soon-to-be-an-uninhabitable-wasteland zone”, but I like the old name better). How does the CO2 get to the Arctic so fast? And how does it get cleaned up by forests that are mostly thousands of kilometres away, so fast?
One wonders if there’s been some “adjustment” to the raw data. Gosh, they wouldn’t do that, would they? How could I have the audacity to even hint at such a thing about fellow scientists?
Smart Rock
The NH forrests are not taking up the CO2, the data showing the transport of most of the NH CO2 buildup down into the SH has not been used.
The carbon cycle as you are expecting to see is not real. It is an illusion, a fantasy. Forget what you were educated to believe.
The CO2 gets into the Arctic as part of the atmospheric mix that is transported into that region on a near continuous basis, sometimes in great volume. It is the same atmospheric transport that breaks up the ice and transports in heat.
http://www.blozonehole.com/blozone-hole-theory/blozone-hole-theory/carbon-cycle-using-nasa-oco-2-satellite-images
Seems that antartica is considerably lower than NH so how does this fit with vostok co2 proxies ?
Man
Perfectly. It records the historical CO2 variation in the NH during the glacial / interglacial periods.
Waste of money.
The website climatecentral.org makes the claim that “2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists.”
Then, a few paragraphs later, they say that “Tropical Storm Madeline blew by Hawaii and knocked carbon dioxide below 400 ppm for a day. But otherwise, we’re living in a 400 ppm world.”
Why would a storm reduce CO2 levels? A storm just moves air around. If CO2 is well mixed, moving air around should not do much to change CO2 levels. Or are they admitting that the CO2 levels are higher than average in Hawaii and don’t really represent a world-wide average?
If Jean Michel Jarre sow this while composing Oxygen he would have called it CO2. This planet lives and breaths CO2. Play it.
http://www.m4gw.com/images/GIFS/OCO-Animated.gif
https://youtu.be/P_I2ch8_TXc
Rafal
Make one of your moving images using the 30 images in the link below.
http://www.blozonehole.com/blozone-hole-theory/blozone-hole-theory/carbon-cycle-using-nasa-oco-2-satellite-images
Rafal,
That’s very nice. I am more familiar with the works of his father, however, Maurice Jarre. I love those biblical epics, Dr. Zhivago, and especially Lawrence of Arabia.
Contrast and compare NASA’s promo with the visualisation and
The NASA OCO-2 science leader pre-launch lecture
Why do they call it a model, when it actually is an adjustment?
This video presentation appears to be biased, CO2 emissions are greatest in the northern hemisphere in winter, because of the lack of foliage, but as the summer returns the added greenery makes the northern hemisphere a net absorber of CO2. The focus is on the northern hemisphere in winter, and then moves to the southern hemisphere in summer, so one does not notice the blue uptake of CO2 during that period. Incredible.
This is fake news. Why mix in computer models to add the angry red in the northern latitudes that are entirely absent from the actual observations. All that is needed is the mere truth – just the observations please, no modelling!
Here’s the observation (not the model):
Why can’t they publish a series of these images and remove the grey areas which are hiding a lot? This is a lot clearer.
Is there any observational data that, for example, suggests that there is an increased GHE over the red areas of Africa compared to that over the light blue areas of Africs?
How does measured DWLWIR change as airborn concentration of CO2 varies each month?
There appears to be seasonal variations of CO2 in the region of 20ppm so can the effect of this variation actually be measured on the ground?
The video is confusing to me, and strikes as purposefully obfuscating.
My critical thought prof in ’75 would call it pseudoscientific razmataz.
So, NASA has emerged full-force as an abstract-art video producer. Way to go, using your funding over there!
I think they missed the mark with the musical background, however — should have been something more scary. As is, it’s like one of those drug commercials where the narrator speaks of all the contraindications in soft, pleasant tones, against a backdrop of happy people doing happy things.
Put some flying dragons in there, … sculls and cross bones, … and, of course, billowing smoke stacks fading in and out of transparency floating across the scene. Come on, guys, cut loose, get those creative producer juices going! You’re getting a lot of money for this stuff, and you call THIS entertainment (Oh, it’s science – I was under the wrong impression, sorrrry).
I’m such an ungrateful dolt. Seriously, I DO love NASA’s visuals, especially the Hubble images. But the CO2 thing just lends itself to such humor, because of the absurd contradictions that are becoming more obvious these days to a few people, at least.
This is the visual equivalent of an artistic representation of the difference between 0.0 degrees and 0.5 degrees.
… 20 parts per million spread.
Hundreds of millions of $$$ wasted on a project providing no new information, an end result being a misleading visualization useful for little more than entertainment.
The brief period 1975-2005 when both CO2 and average global temperature both increased, misled a lot of folks into thinking there is a connection between CO2 and climate.
Thermalization and the complete dominance of water vapor in reverse-thermalization explain why CO2 has no significant effect on climate. Terrestrial EMR absorbed by CO2 is effectively rerouted to space via water vapor.
Dan
there is new information – it shows Gavin’s crew simulations / modelling to be just flat out wrong.
If you compare the observations that these swines have been aware of from the first whole earth scan to what they have been spouting there is a considerable credibility gap.
They have tried to paper over the chasm by fiddling with the data presentation so you can’t conveniently compare it to the model.
This is fraud.
“OCO-2 is an exploratory science mission designed to collect space-based global measurements of atmospheric CO2 with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to characterize sources and sinks (fluxes) on regional scales (≥1000km). OCO-2 will also be able to quantify CO2 variability over the seasonal cycles year after year.” From the mission statement. http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/
Unfortunately, it succeeded in pinpointing sources and sinks which is why you are not allowed to view them.
Betapug +1
So where are the ground based seasonal measurements of DWLWIR corresponding to the atmospheric seasonal variations in CO2?
Is any of this being measured? What correlation is there on seasonal basis?
The presentation focuses on North America during winter with the map positioned to obscure the fact that so much of the emissions are coming from Asia and then the view shifts to Asia when summer comes and CO2 concentrations drop.
If someone didn’t know better they would think North America is the major source of emissions.
Purely accidental I’m sure.
References:
Trenberth et al 2011jcli24 Figure 10
This popular balance graphic and assorted variations are based on a power flux, W/m^2. A W is not energy, but energy over time, i.e. 3.4 Btu/eng h or 3.6 kJ/SI h. The 342 W/m^2 ISR is determined by spreading the average 1,368 W/m^2 solar irradiance/constant over the spherical ToA surface area. (1,368/4 =342) There is no consideration of the elliptical orbit (perihelion = 1,416 W/m^2 to aphelion = 1,323 W/m^2) or day or night or seasons or tropospheric thickness or energy diffusion due to oblique incidence, etc. This popular balance models the earth as a ball suspended in a hot fluid with heat/energy/power entering evenly over the entire ToA spherical surface. This is not even close to how the real earth energy balance works. Everybody uses it. Everybody should know better.
An example of a real heat balance based on Btu/h is attached. Basically (Incoming Solar Radiation spread over the cross sectional area) = (U*A*dT et. al. leaving the lit side perpendicular to the spherical surface ToA) + (U*A*dT et. al. leaving the dark side perpendicular to spherical surface area ToA) The atmosphere is just a simple HVAC heat balance problem.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7373
“Technically, there is no absolute dividing line between the Earth’s atmosphere and space, but for scientists studying the balance of incoming and outgoing energy on the Earth, it is conceptually useful to think of the altitude at about 100 kilometers above the Earth as the “top of the atmosphere.” The top of the atmosphere is the bottom line of Earth’s energy budget, the Grand Central Station of radiation. It is the place where solar energy (mostly visible light) enters the Earth system and where both reflected light and invisible, thermal radiation from the Sun-warmed Earth exit. The balance between incoming and outgoing energy at the top of the atmosphere determines the Earth’s average temperature. The ability of greenhouses gases to change the balance by reducing how much thermal energy exits is what global warming is all about.”
ToA is 100 km or 62 miles. It is 68 miles between Denver and Colorado Springs. That’s not just thin, that’s ludicrous thin.
The GHE/GHG loop as shown on Trenberth Figure 10 is made up of three main components: upwelling of 396 W/m^2 which has two parts: 63 W/m^2 and 333 W/m^2 and downwelling of 333 W/m^2.
The 396 W/m^2 is determined by inserting 16 C or 279K in the S-B BB equation. This result produces 55 W/m^2 of power flux more than ISR entering ToA, an obvious violation of conservation of energy created out of nothing. That should have been a warning.
ISR of 341 W/m^2 enter ToA, 102 W/m^2 are reflected by the albedo, leaving a net 239 W/m^2 entering ToA. 78 W/m^2 are absorbed by the atmosphere leaving 161 W/m^2 for the surface. To maintain the energy balance and steady temperature 160 W/m^2 rises from the surface (0.9 residual in ground) as 17 W/m^2 convection, 80 W/m^2 latent and 63 W/m^2 LWIR (S-B BB 183 K, -90 C or emissivity = .16) = 160 W/m^2. All of the graphic’s power fluxes are now present and accounted for. The remaining 333 W/m^2 are the spontaneous creation of an inappropriate application of the S-B BB equation violating conservation of energy.
But let’s press on.
The 333 W/m^2 upwelling/downwelling constitutes a 100% efficient perpetual energy loop violating thermodynamics. There is no net energy left at the surface to warm the earth and there is no net energy left in the troposphere to impact radiative balance at ToA.
The 333 W/m^2, 97% of ISR, upwells into the troposphere where it is allegedly absorbed/trapped/blocked by a miniscule 0.04% of the atmosphere. That’s a significant heat load for such a tiny share of atmospheric molecules and they should all be hotter than two dollar pistols.
Except they aren’t.
The troposphere is cold, -40 C at 30,000 ft, 9 km, < -60 C at ToA. Depending on how one models the troposphere, average or layered from surface to ToA, the S-B BB equation for the tropospheric temperatures ranges from 150 to 250 W/m^2, a considerable shortfall from 333.
(99% of the atmosphere is below 32 km where energy moves by convection/conduction/latent/radiation & where ideal S-B does not apply. Above 32 km the low molecular density does not allow for convection/conduction/latent and energy moves by S-B ideal radiation et. al.)
But wait!
The GHGs reradiate in all directions not just back to the surface. Say a statistical 33% makes it back to the surface that means 50 to 80 W/m^2. A longer way away from 333.
But wait!
Because the troposphere is not ideal the S-B equation must consider emissivity. Nasif Nahle suggests CO2 emissivity could be around 0.1 or 5 to 8 W/m^2 re-radiated back to the surface. Light years from 333.
But wait!
All of the above really doesn’t even matter since there is no net connection or influence between the 333 W/m^2 thermodynamically impossible loop and the radiative balance at ToA. Just erase this loop from the graphic and nothing else about the balance changes.
BTW 7 of the 8 reanalyzed (i.e. water board the data till it gives up the right answer) data sets/models show more power flux leaving OLR than entering ASR ToA or atmospheric cooling. Trenberth was not happy. Obviously, those seven data sets/models have it completely wrong because there can’t possibly be any flaw in the GHE theory.
The GHE greenhouse analogy not only doesn’t apply to the atmosphere, it doesn’t even apply to warming a real greenhouse. (“How Global Warming was Discovered” Spencer Weart) It’s the physical barrier of walls, glass, plastic that traps convective heat, not some kind of handwavium glassy transparent radiative thermal diode.
The surface of the earth is warm for the same reason a heated house is warm in the winter: Q = U * A * dT, the energy flow/heat resisting blanket of the insulated walls. The composite thermal conductivity of that paper thin atmosphere, conduction, convection, latent, LWIR, resists the flow of energy, i.e. heat, from surface to ToA and that requires a temperature differential, 213 K ToA and 288 K surface = 75 C.
The flow through a fluid heat exchanger requires a pressure drop. A voltage differential is needed to push current through a resistor. Same for the atmospheric blanket. A blanket works by Q = U * A * dT, not S-B BB. The atmosphere is just a basic HVAC system boundary analysis.
Open for rebuttal. If you can explain how this upwelling/downwelling/”back” radiation actually works be certain to copy Jennifer Marohasy as she has posted a challenge for such an explanation.
Nicholas,
You said, “Say a statistical 33% makes it back to the surface that means 50 to 80 W/m^2. A longer [sic] way away from 333.”
How did you arrive at the estimate of 33%? I can see that because of the curvature of the Earth, less than 50% of the downwelling radiation might make it to the surface. However, 33% seems low to me.