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How long does it take for air to mix worldwide? I visited NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii last month. It's one of the key global sites where carbon diox

How long does it take for air to mix worldwide? I visited NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii last month. It's one of the key global sites where carbon dioxide is monitored. The scientist giving the tour answered this, and I believe it was on the order of a few weeks for mixing to occur. Here's a visualization that starts to answer your question: https://amp.livescience.com/48798-carbon-dioxide-global-computer-model.html https://amp.livescience.com/48798-carbon-dioxide-global-comp... I would love a more detailed answer to this question as well. (I visited the Mauna Loa Ovservatory because of our open source project to track carbon dioxide worldwide: https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby http://carbondoomsday.com http://carbondoomsday.com)

mturmon 9y ago
That is a nice link (showing global CO2 estimates in 2006). It illustrates how turbulence mixes the atmosphere at global scales. The video mentions that better measurements will result from the OCO-2 mission, which launched in the meantime and has been measuring CO2 in ~3km^2 footprints across the globe since 2014. A result is: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4514 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4514 which shows vertically-resolved CO2. Both videos make it clear that CO2 is generally well-mixed both horizontally and vertically in the atmosphere, with the exception of Northern vs Southern hemisphere. I believe CO2 emissions from China, for example, take on the order of a week to propagate across the Pacific and reach the Western US.