Introduction

The escalating global climate change is driven by increased atmospheric content of greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide (CO₂). The atmospheric CO₂ content (usually given as parts per million, ppm) has been continually measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii since 1958. Today the atmospheric CO₂ content is also measured at several other places. Global average estimates go back to 1980. In this post you will import historical records of atmospheric CO₂ levels.

Prerequisites

You must have the complete SPIDE installed as described in the post Install and setup spatial data IDE. You must have setup Karttur’s GeoImagine Framework, either by importing or by copying (drag and drop). The Framework postgres database must be setup and the processes defined.

CO₂ records

Access data

The records of observed CO₂ are available from different sites. Karttur´s GeoImagine Framework is set up for importing climate index data from datahub.io.

You can choose any records you like. In this tutorial post, and all the following posts, I will use the iconic Mauna Loa record and the global average, both at a monthly resolution.

Data format

Karttur’s import function for CO₂ records expects an ASCII (normal text) file with comma separation (.csv). The first row should be the column headers, with the columns as shown in the example below:

Date,Decimal Date,Average,Interpolated,Trend,Number of Days
1958-03-01,1958.208,315.71,315.71,314.62,-1
1958-04-01,1958.292,317.45,317.45,315.29,-1

Download data

Download the CO2 record(s) that you want to include in your database from datahub.io. At present the Framework only uses monthly data. Make sure that the destination filename does not contain any underscore (“_”) and that the file extension is “.csv”. You can save the files to any location on your machine. You only need to remember where you put them when you define the import path in the next section.

Import as ancillary Data

The observed CO₂ records data are imported into Karttur´s GeoImagine Framework as ancillary data. But the CO₂ observatioans are saved in the database schema climateindex. The xml file below imports the Mauna Loa and global monthly records.

Project file

The project file is the same as used for importing climate indexes in the previous post, but with one (1) additional link to the xml file defining the plots shown above (projFN = ‘/doc/ClimateIndexes/xml/climateIndex-0100_import-co2records.xml’):

from geoimagine.kartturmain.readXMLprocesses import ReadXMLProcesses, RunProcesses

if __name__ == "__main__":

    verbose = True

    #projFN = '/doc/ClimateIndexes/xml/climateIndex-0100_import-NOAA.xml'
    projFN = '/doc/ClimateIndexes/xml/climateIndex-0100_import-co2records.xml'

    procLL = ReadXMLProcesses(projFN,verbose)

    RunProcesses(procLL,verbose)

Plot and analyse trend in atmospheric CO₂

Plotting, decomposing and analysing the variations in atmospheric CO₂ is covered in the next post.