Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations by fossil fuel combustion is the main driver of global warming. Global CO₂ retrieval products based on continuous satellite observations reveal nonuniform distributions of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. However, current studies on climate simulation are mainly based on assumptions of globally uniform mean or latitudinally resolved CO₂ concentrations.  

Prof. DENG Xiangzheng, at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his collaborators published a paper entitled “Global monthly gridded atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations under the historical and future scenarios” in Scientific Data at Nature Publishing Group in March 2022. 

These researchers reconstructed the global monthly distributions of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations with a 1^o resolution from 1850 to 2013, which are based on the historical monthly latitudinally resolved CO₂ concentrations and account longitudinal features retrieved by fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. The spatial distributions of CO₂ concentrations under shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) and representative concentration pathways (RCPs) scenarios were generated based on the spatial, seasonal and interannual scales of the current CO₂ concentrations from 2015 to 2150.  

The study shows the spatial distributions of global atmospheric CO₂ concentrations (ppm) averaged during 2041-2060 (critical period for carbon neutrality). The global monthly gridded atmospheric CO₂ dataset can be accessed via the Zenodo data repository http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5021361. 

In addition they found that the heterogenous CO₂ distributions could enhance the realism of global climate modeling for better anticipating the potential socio-economic implications, adaptation practices, and mitigation of climate change.  

Reference:

Cheng, W., Dan, L., Deng, X., Feng, J., Wang, Y., Peng, J., Tian, J., Qi, W., Liu, Z., Zheng, X., Zhou, D., Jiang, S., Zhao, H., Wang, X. Global monthly gridded atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations under the historical and future scenarios. Scientific Data 9 (1), 83 (2022).