Team Sea Waves

Sea Alarm

High-Level Project Summary

The purpose of our project is to raise awareness among people about the issue of sea levels rising. We plan to create a web application that will create visualizations of the rise of sea levels in our country's coastal zones and provide people the option to view the worldwide scale of the problem. And, we want to provide people with data about the tree percentage in their area. Giving people empirical data about the rise or decline of trees in their area. We hope seeing a decline may motivate people to plant more trees. We also want to provide people with a checklist for them to be able to have a daily goal that works towards reducing CO2 emissions.

Link to Final Project

https://seaalarm.nexuseltd.com/

Link to Project "Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDlPniJMlIc

Detailed Project Description

Climate Change and Its Effects on The Rise of Sea Levels

The challenge we decided to tackle was how climate change affected us. One of the biggest and most dangerous effects of climate change is Global warming. It is a serious issue that not only causing ice sheets to melt but also the sea water to expand[1], rising sea levels constantly as a result. We realized not a lot of people in our country don't really think about this issue. Because this is not a current issue. A lot of people think they are safe because of the extensive networks polders that encircle our country[2]. But even if it isn’t an immediate issue, our future could be really dark if we don’t start taking some measures to prevent sea rise. By 2100, the water level on the coastal zone of our country could rise about 2 feet. By 2400, it could rise well above 5-6 feet as seen in data collected from below[3]. As a result, we can lose upto 29,846 sq. km of land[4].

It may seem like a long time away, but do we really want to let our future generations deal with these disasters? Especially if we had the power to prevent it from happening or at least mitigate its severity? It would be heartless of us if we did. So, our project aims to raise awareness in people and give them some easy daily tasks that could greatly benefit our future. We want to give people validation with data to show them how much help they have been, hopefully, to motivate them to do even more and inspire others to follow through as well.

Our Solution

Our project is a web-based application that we plan to evolve into a mobile app into the future. As our main goal is to make people aware of the problem of rising sea levels, we are looking into ways we can visualize this very real threat to the masses. We are using data from the Satellite Sea Level Observations from the NASA Global Climate Change Portal[5] for the worldwide rise of sea levels.

We are planning on getting an overhead view of the local area of our users using the Earth Explorer data from Landsat [6] and comparing it with previous data of the same area. To accurately get the location we are manually entering the longitude and latitude of each area. We planning on developing an algorithm that can calculate the percentage of greenery in an image. Using the algorithm, we will compare the greenery yearly to find out the comparison data.

We are also creating a checklist of daily tasks people can do to reduce their carbon footprints. We are calculating the CO2 emissions per capita[7] to get an idea about how much CO2 emissions can be reduced by using our app both on an individual level, but also in masse. Providing people with tangible data of how much help they can be to the environment. Research has shown that in a real-world setting, participants self-selected a behavior that they would perform in response to a once-a-day and daily cue for 12 weeks, each day reporting the enactment of the behavior and its automaticity. This study ﬁtted an asymptotic curve (in which the increase with each day reduces over time until a plateau is reached) to each individual’s automaticity data, examining the time when 95% of the asymptote was reached[8]. Which is why we chose to create a daily routine/checklist to maximize the awareness in people. Hoping we can motivate them to do some short tasks per day if they can see how much help they are being to the environment.

Our application is mainly based on Laravel.

Space Agency Data

Satellite Sea Level Observations from the NASA Global Climate Change Portal to gain the data for our visualization of sea level rise from 1993 to the present day. As this graph is publicly available and updated quite frequently, it has been a huge help to our project.
NASA Sea Level Change Portal's Graph to visualize the rise in sea levels of our country as well as the rest of the world. This graph can be used to visualize the sea rise in our coastal zones.
Earth Explorer data from Landsat for our data showing the increase and decrease of tree percentage. Landsat is a joint program between UGSC and NASA.

Hackathon Journey

As our very first Hackathon journey, we are happy to say it was a truly rewarding experience. Working side by side with the brightest young minds of our generation has taught us how far we still have to go. And the guidance & support we received from our mentors was essential for the completion of our project. We couldn't be more grateful for this opportunity. Our project is made possible only because of the various data we have collected from NASA. The sea rise data we collected from the Sea Level Change portal is one of the reasons we became interested in this project in the first place. The predicted rise of sea levels in our country made us very worried about the future. So, we are trying our best to raise awareness of the issue and inspire people to do the same. We believe with a very small amount of effort, us as one can make for a better tomorrow.

We would like to thank BASIS and NASA for this lovely opportunity and also our mentors for guiding us through it all.