#EarthDayAtHome with Data Visualizer Lori Perkins

Hi I’m Lori Perkins and I’m the acting head for NASA Scientific Visualization Studio or SVS. At the SVS we want you to understand NASA science and NASA scientific results through data visualization. Today I really want to highlight one of my favorite new visualizations by the SVS’s Cindy Starr. Cindy was tasked with making a visualization to show global methane. So she starts with something like this. It looks like a sphere and the sphere represents the earth, but for her to really understand, for her to really show global methane she has to bring in more information.

So she brings in satellite 00:43 - data of topography. How high the mountains are, how low the valleys are. That data isn’t just gonna be enough though for you to understand what’s going on in the atmosphere, so she has to exaggerate the topography by 50 percent. Then the key to any good visualization is to work with the experts in the field and in this case those experts came from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office and NASA’s Biospheric Sciences lab there’s three scientists in particular I’d like to send a shout-out to They’re Dr. Ben Poulter, Dr. Abhishek Chatterjee and Dr. Lesley Ott. These scientists use gidded land data and a dynamic vegetation model to determine where those methane sources are and how that gas gets transported all around our atmosphere.

It turns out that 30 percent 01:36 - of that gas is produced from wetlands so our scientists have to understand the dynamics of ponds and lakes and rivers. They also have to understand its other sources. Twenty percent of our methane comes from agriculture from livestock and waste management, from rice cultivation. Thirty percent of our global methane comes from oil and gas and coal extraction. And then there’s also global methane sources in wildfires, in biomass burning, in permafrost, termites and dams, and the ocean.

02:13 - Scientists around the world are working together to better understand our global methane budget with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving global predictions. I hope you like these visualizations and if you do please come see our website. We have a few other visualizations coming up showing earth as an interconnected system of systems, showing how our ocean currents and our clouds and our precipitation, how changes in our ocean, our ozone and our vegetation, changes in our land can all be interconnected. This is NASA at home and I’m Lori Perkins thanks for watching. .