In keeping with the SC spirit of HPC matters, we wanted to share another amazing example of supercomputing in action. Last week, NASA officials released the first ever ultra-high-resolution computer model of global atmospheric carbon dioxide. The simulation, which can be seen below, depicts the puffs and swirls of carbon dioxide as it circumnavigates the globe. While we wrote about the hardware that enabled the project previously, the simulation and resultant visualization merit further attention.
Solid data for ground-level carbon dioxide measurements goes back decades, but it was only in July that NASA began tracking global space-based carbon levels, thanks to the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite, the first NASA satellite mission to provide a global view of carbon dioxide. The new computer model, called GEOS-5, was created by scientists at NASA Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. It runs at a resolution that is 64 times greater than that of typical global climate models. The resultant visualization, part of a simulation called “Nature Run,” brings this model to life in a way that is as breath-taking as it is shocking.
As explained by NASA, Nature Run is loaded with data on atmospheric conditions and the global greenhouse gas emission data from both natural and man-made sources. The full Nature Rum simulation covered two years, from May 2005 to June 2007, running on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation’s Discover supercomputer cluster at Goddard Space Flight Center. It produced nearly four petabytes of data and took 75 days to complete. The project is key to advancing scientific understanding of climate change and the behavior of carbon dioxide, which reached the critical 400 parts per million threshold this year.
“The visualization compresses one year of data into a few minutes,” narrates Bill Putman, lead scientist on the project from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas affected by human activity. About half of the carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuel combustion remains in the air, while the other half is absorbed by natural land and ocean reservoirs.
“In the Northern hemisphere, we see the highest concentrations are focused around major emissions sources over North America, Europe and Asia. Notice how the gas doesn’t stay in one place, it’s controlled by large scale weather patterns within the global circulation. During spring and summer in the northern hemisphere, plants absorb a substantial amount of carbon through photosynthesis, thus removing some of the gas from the atmosphere. We see this change in the model as the red and purple colors begin to fade.”
“OCO-2 observations and atmospheric models like GEOS-5 will work closely together to better understand both human emissions and natural fluxes of carbon dioxide,” continues Putman. “This will help guide climate models toward more reliable predictions of future conditions across the globe.”
Aside from these stunning visualizations, NASA’s Goddard scientists are also releasing a robust version of Nature Run to the scientific community. Both the model and the visualization were demoed at the SC14 supercomputing conference last week in New Orleans.