High-Level Project Summary
The project is based on improving the existing Quake Hunter website, a site that shows recent earthquake data. We suggest an improvement on that website to show more than just recent earthquake data, the idea is to take data from NASA satellites around the world which could track different data such as natural disasters and catastrophes, volcanic explosions, pollution, and other climate conditions, also on more investigation more social data could be monitored as wars, based on image, chemical and ambiental factors that could be monitored from the satellites. This solution could be used to evaluate where it would be better to travel or move out.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The goal of the project is to provide a safety level measure. To do that, we took an existing NASA API that shows the most recent earthquakes and its magnitude. This safety level measure is based on climate conditions, natural disasters and catastrophes, pollution, and social conditions such as war based on image data from satellites and chemicals present usually in war zones, based on up-to-date data coming from NASA satellites.
As there are many variables to take into account and not all data we wanted to use was up to date and easy to find, we implemented a demo version using data from Meteomatics and EONET API from NASA, as for the coding part of the software we have been using NASA’s WorldWind. The demo adds a country layer where the safety level will be displayed; in the demo to display the safety level, the country name needs to be searched to show the information, in future versions, it will be implemented to be shown when the mouse is over a country. Moreover, you can check for each factor considered which punctuation has on its own and it shows the punctuation in a color based on the safety level.
To develop an improved version and more detailed, it would be very great if NASA offered publicly up-to-date information from the different parameters of the climate and phenomena around the world that could be tracked, also apart from updated data would be great if that were available via API as nowadays, the latest data available from NASA, for example about UV, was from 2010. As mentioned previously, the functionality to show the safety index when the mouse is in a country and also to show all the colors according to the safety level on the map without needing to search or be with the mouse in a country. To add more functionality it would be nice to implement a timeline to see past safety and environmental conditions and on top of that there could be implemented a predictive model to predict safety levels and environmental conditions in the near future. Finally, the data taken into account could be split into different layers so each different environmental condition could be seen alone and also choose your ponderation to adapt the safety level.
With this idea and future implementations, we aspire to provide an easy and intuitive way to show which places would be more convenient to travel or move out, furthermore it could be used in an educational way to make people aware of the rising dangers around the world related to the climate conditions amplified by the human behavior.
Space Agency Data
The data we’ve used for the demo version has been extracted from https://www.meteomatics.com/en/api/available-parameters/ considering which parameters would interest us more, despite not being a space agency was an offer of the hackathon and we found data that worked well with our project. We also used the data from the EONET (Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker) https://eonet.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/v3 which had great data that could be found on the EOSDIS website and an API itself to get the data.
Hackathon Journey
Our experience in Space Apps Challenge was great, we could develop our data skills and learned a lot about how to manage data and come up with an innovative solution from our point of view. During the process of our project, we had to face a few challenges related to finding the specific data we expected and adapting to the coding way of WorldWind. What inspired us to choose this challenge was that we wanted to raise awareness of the impact of human behavior on the climate and the rising dangers it carries in a very visual and interactive way, but after we developed more of the idea we ended up making a tool more practical and useful to the users, so we developed an app that collects the data and gives us an estimate on the best place to live or travel, and most importantly to give a solution to a current problem that is not yet covered but not discarding the original purpose of the project, just adding the practical point to it. The approach we used was to make a useful app to spread awareness of the rising dangers and the human impact on them and an easy way to check if it’s safe to travel or move out to a country for each user using Earth data visualization and improve it by adding different analysis tools.