Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a greenhouse gas: it lets the sunlight pass, but absorbs the long-wavelength energy radiating back from the Earth, just like the glass of a greenhouse. Greenhouse gases matter because they keep the atmosphere warm and make life on Earth possible. But over the last decades the concentration of CO₂ has kept rising to unprecedented levels because of human activity.
I built a 3D map that visualizes a reanalysis of CO₂ concentrations as a regular 3D grid. The values are measured in ppm (molecules of CO₂ per million molecules of dry air) and represent average measurements for the month of January of each year.
CO₂ data for January 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 comes from the CAMS global greenhouse gas reanalysis (Copernicus), processed with ArcGIS Pro and xarray, and visualized with the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript. The reanalysis method is described in this technical note.