NASA images show cloud of polluting gas moving over Earth

Images released by NASA (United States space agency) on July 23 show a dense cloud of carbon dioxide moving through the Earth’s atmosphere. According to the agency, the main sources of the polluting gas that can be seen in the images are power plants, fires and urban settlements.

The dynamic map was produced by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio and uses a high-resolution satellite-based weather model. The data used to produce the images was collected between January and March 2020.

“As policymakers and scientists, we are trying to account for where carbon comes from and how it impacts the planet,” says Lesley Ott, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It is possible to see [na imagem] how everything is interconnected by these different weather patterns”, he added.

According to the scientist, in the regions of China, the United States and South Asia, gas emissions come mainly from power plants, industry and vehicles (cars and trucks). In Africa and South America, the sources are fires related to soil management, controlled fires in agriculture, deforestation and the burning of oil and coal.

“We didn’t want people to get the impression that there was no carbon dioxide in the sparse regions,” says AJ Christensen, senior data visualization designer at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “But we also really wanted to highlight the dense regions, because that’s the interesting feature of the data. We were trying to show that there is a lot of density over New York and Beijing,” he said.

See the dynamic map in the video below.

What is carbon dioxide?

Carbon dioxide is the main cause of rising temperatures on Earth, according to scientists. The gas is present naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere, but it is also produced by burning fossil fuels and biomass (organic matter of plant or animal origin). When gas builds up very quickly and in large quantities in the atmosphere, temperatures rise.

According to researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), 2023 was the hottest year on record.

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(Published by Everton Lopes Batista)