Earth ID: 5022

OCO-2 Gridded Global Carbon Dioxide (CO₂)

Visualizations by Helen-Nicole Kostis Released on February 24, 2023

NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, 2 (OCO-2) provides the most complete dataset tracking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main driver of climate change. Since its launch (July 2014), OCO-2 measures sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface to infer the dry-air column-averaged CO2 mixing ratio and provides around 100,000 cloud-free observations.

However, the OCO-2 data as observed by the on-board instrument have large data gaps in coverage due to the narrow 10-km ground track and an inability to see through clouds and aerosols. To provide a gap-filled view of Earth’s carbon cycle and atmosphere NASA’s Global and Modeling Assimilation Office (GMAO) ingests OCO-2 retrievals every 6 hours with a modeling and assimilation technique and derives the Gridded Monthly OCO-2 Carbon Dioxide/OCO-2 GEOS Level 3 product.

The visualizations on this page feature the Gridded Monthly OCO-2 Carbon Dioxide assimilated dataset and demonstrate the global distribution and variation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the period January 2015-February 2022. One obvious feature that we see in the data visualization is a continual increase in carbon dioxide with time, as seen in the shift in the color of the map from dark purple towards light yellow as time progresses. Another feature is the seasonal variation of carbon dioxide in the northern hemisphere, which is governed by the growth cycle of plants. This can be seen as a pulsing in the colors, with a shift towards lighter colors starting in April/May each year and a shift towards darker as the end of each growing season passes into winter. The seasonal cycle is more pronounced in the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere since most of the land mass is in the north.

The visualization includes a data-driven spatial map of global carbon dioxide (CO₂) that is paired with a date legend (monthly timestep) and an animated colormap that includes the monthly global mean value of carbon dioxide from OCO-2.

The rest of this page offers visualization assets, layers in plate carrée and mollweide projections and a custom version for Science on a Sphere displays.

Assets for plate carrée projection

This set of frames provides the annotation layer of the OCO-2 gridded global carbon dioxide visualization sequence. The annotation layer consists of the visualization title, the animated colorbar and the timestamp. Frames are provided with transparency in 4K resolution.

Assets for mollweide projection

This set of frames provides the composition of the OCO-2 gridded global carbon dioxide visualization sequence in mollweide projection with transparency. Frames are provided in 4K resolution.

This set of frames provides the map layer of the OCO-2 gridded global carbon dioxide visualization sequence in mollweide projection. Frames are provided with transparency in 4K resolution.

Science on a Sphere (SOS) content
The following section contains assets designed for Science On a Sphere and related displays.
SOS playlist file: playlist.sos
SOS label file: labels.txt

Colormap
The following section contains colormap information.

Colorbar for the OCO-2 gridded global carbon dioxide (CO₂) visualization sequence. Blue/purple- to-orange/yellow colormap (low-to-high values) to show the increase and seasonality of global carbon dioxide over the years.

For More Information

https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov/

Visualization Credits

Helen-Nicole Kostis (USRA): Lead Visualizer
Lesley Ott (NASA/GSFC): Lead Scientist
Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.): Technical Support
Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.): Technical Support
Eric Sokolowsky (Global Science and Technology, Inc.): Technical Support

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5022

Mission:
Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2)

Data Used:

Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2/OCO-2/OCO-2 GEOS Level 3 monthly, 0.5x0.625 assimilated CO2 V10r also referred to as: OCO-2 GEOS Level 3 monthly

NASA

OCO-2 GEOS (Goddard Earth Observing System) Level 3 data are produced by ingesting OCO-2 L2 retrievals every 6 hours with GEOS CoDAS, a modeling and data assimilation system maintained by NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO). GEOS CoDAS uses a high-performance computing implementation of the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation approach for solving the state estimation problem. GSI finds the analyzed state that minimizes the three-dimensional variational (3D-Var) cost function formulation of the state estimation problem.

10.5067/BGFIODET3HZ8

Credit:
NASA

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