NASA is preparing for a very stark future in which carbon cycles suddenly just stop working. Earth's oceans and land ecosystems are currently uptaking about 50 percent of the carbon we're emitting, NASA says, but there's no guarantee that it'll stay this way forever—especially since the amount of carbon being pushed into the atmosphere is rising as a whole.In a press release, NASA said that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere measures at 400 parts per million (ppm), but it's rising at 2 ppm every year. While we can pin much of that to human involvement, growing forests also add more carbon than they're uptaking.
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NASA is hoping that the measurements it's finding through its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite, which started sending measuring carbon-based greenhouse gas concentrations last year, will move UN ambassadors at an international climate conference in Paris at the end of November.The image above, generated through the Goddard Earth Observing System-5 (GEOS-5) model, shows swirls of concentrated CO2 overtaking the Northern hemisphere. This shouldn't be a surprise—there's evidence to suggest CO2 fluctuations are strongest in the Northern Hemisphere.The GEOS-5 news is about a year old, but the space agency is presenting even more data from its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite. It will also preview some field work in Antarctica, where NASA is already doing extensive work monitoring polar winds in a flying laboratories, and Alaska, where NASA is observing glacial melts.The agency has started to image the sources of CO2 emissions, which range from large metropolitan cities to biomass burning like forest fires. The video above shows one such model, where you can see wisps of blue indicating carbon coming from large cities, and reds, where biomass burns are occurring. Central Africa, for some reason, has a lot of that."Along with the land and ocean observations, we now have a more complete picture that we've never had before, and you get a sense of all the variability and complexity of the processes controlling atmospheric CO2," said Lesley Ott, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.Ott also mentioned that NASA was developing systems that will enable even more measurements to be taken. For instance, allowing CO2 to be tracked in the dark so we can understand where those gases flow during the night when the atmosphere cools down. It all goes toward building a better documented picture of how the greenhouse gases circulate around the Earth."We have to try to understand all of these processes together in order to understand the atmospheric observations that we're getting from our satellites, which is quite a big task," Ott said.