Description

"NOAA encourages science that adds benefit to society and the environment. CarbonTracker does both." said retired Navy Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. CarbonTracker was developed in the Earth System Research Laboratory in the Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases group and is a system to keep track of carbon dioxide uptake and release at the Earth's surface over time. CarbonTracker as a scientific tool will, together with long-term monitoring of atmospheric CO₂, help improve the understanding of how carbon uptake and release from land, ecosystems, and oceans are responding to a changing climate, increasing levels of atmospheric CO₂ (the CO₂ fertilization effect), and other environmental changes, including human management of land and oceans. NOAA's CarbonTracker website

This data set shows the distribution of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for every day of the year 2004, allowing the large variations in CO₂ from day-to-day (often called 'carbon weather') to be illustrated along with season-to-season changes. The data set also shows black and white dots at every location and time that NOAA ESRL and collaborators collect samples of air to analyze the contents for CO₂ and multiple other gases. These are the locations for which we know the mixing ratios of CO₂ exactly. The rest of the globe is filled in by a computer model driven by our best knowledge of the surface sources and sinks (fossil fuel and biomass burning emissions, biospheric and ocean uptake or release) of CO₂ that are across the globe. The CO₂ plumes can be seen moving across the globe, illustrating the importance of monitoring CO₂ globally, not just locally. The large variations in CO₂ concentration from season to season are due to the plant life. During the winter season, plants and trees respire CO₂ as they shed leaves and stop growing or decay, adding much CO₂ to the atmosphere. This process reverses during spring and summer, when they have plenty of access to sunlight and grow leaves and flowers, or increase their size substantially. This time of year is very well visible in the movie: in July the NH shows intense blue colors especially over the mid-latitude regions where forests and crops are soaking up CO₂ in great amounts. The large change in CO₂ between the seasons caused by plant activity is sometimes referred to as the 'breathing' of the planet. In the tropics, intense red areas are visible especially during July, August and September. This is due to the burning of biomass. Some of this is natural, such as dry grasses on the savannas burning, but most of it is man-made as people burn fields to prepare them for another year of production, or burn forests to make way for new agricultural lands.

Notable Features

• Seasonal variations in the level of CO₂ over land
• Intense concentration of CO₂ in the tropics due to biomass burning
• High levels of CO₂ emitted from cities (best visible in January)

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