High-Level Project Summary
Our idea is about making a web application collecting the data of earthquakes, green gasses, and tsunamis on Earth in the past in one place to make it easier for anyone to get this data. The user, can use the search engine of the web application to choose first if he wants to get information about any country, then he will be able to search about some of these features (Country, Year, Continent).After searching he will get analyzed data about what he searches about on a model of the earth planet to help in determining the place of this earthquake, climate change, or tsunami on earth. Also, the dashboard will contain the graph and charts about the topic he user is searching for.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Richmond Observation Platform is our innovative solution for the on-going challenge of mis-intervention of Earth observation data and lack of data analysis tools responsible for this mission. It’s an Earth data visualization app that combines data from different sources to visualize live and historic greenhouse gasses percentage, tsunamis, and earthquakes and represent in the most-possible user-friendly interactive interface that flourishes the user’s understanding of data. This is done through the usage of area-specific interactions, plotting, graphing, and interactive filtering. All of these features mainly aim to help geologists, data analysts, environment enthusiasts, and decision makers to accurately observe the Earth and make precise decisions.
Our platform is mainly consisted of multiple analysis models. The first page the user will interfere with is the main home landing page, which we designed by using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It mainly contains the project the description followed with navigating links to our three data analysis models (Earthquakes, Green gasses, Tsunami). These models are functioning upon OpenStreetMap, which is collaborative project to create a free editable geographic database of the world. Each model works to represent the desired data in plotted interactive formats. For example, In the Earthquakes model, the user will see a map with plotted dot referring to the earthquake in this area. The dots will have a color of 6 different colors depending on the magnitude of the quake. If the user clicked on this dot, a message box will appear containing the exact magnitude of the quake and its exact location from the nearest city. The user can navigate to the dashboard to see some statistics like highest and lowest magnitude of earthquake, country with most quakes and one with the lowest quakes. This dashboard mainly functions to extract the plotted graphs from the analyzed data and represent them on the dashboard using the python library Django. On the other hand, the greenhouse gases analysis model rapidly represents the gases and related-fields in ratio graphs once the user click on the desired country.
Through continuous developing, we were able to add distinctive features in the Richmond platform. These features start from the home page in which the user would find navigating links to access earthquakes, tsunamis, and greenhouse gases all in one platform. Into the data, the platform is full of tools that ease the user experience. First of them was area selected interaction that allow the user to easily navigate through the visualized map and click on the area to check its information. Secondly, all the data is represented in easily interpreted graph and plots. The platform also offers a time slider that allow the user to smoothly check the data in different time periods and compare it from year to another. To rapidly reach the desired data, the Tsunami web app is supported with search filter layers. All of these are provided coupled with 24/7 live earthquakes web app that updates on daily basis.
What we hope to achieve with project is to have a platform that gets the most benefit of the heaps of Earth observation data in multiple fields and represent in with a user-friendly interactive interface that allow the understanding the data with no matter of the level of experience of the user. We were aiming to develop this platform to be a reliable source for data-analysts, geologists, and decision makers to shape our Earth future with preventing multiple disasters.
Developing such a project wasn’t an easy process. It required working with multiple programming languages, techniques, and libraries. These languages included Google-colab, python 3, Django, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Matplot library, seaborn, scala, pandas, bootstrap.
Space Agency Data
From defining the challenge to developing Richmond Observation platform, Space agencies data, resources, and articles were crucial to offer a reliable solution. For our Earthquakes web application, we queried API of the USGS Earthquakes catalog as our reference for the live data of earthquakes. Into developing our analytical models, we got inspired from the user-friendly ESA GeoPortal in the way of data filtering, representing, and visualization. The way it used OpenStreetMap to present the information with selected area representation was inspiring for the development of our interface. Also, we got deep with the Earth Observing Dashboard that shows global environmental changes observed by NASA, ESA, and JAXA to extract the data required for the greenhouse gasses model and connects the atmospheric gasses contents to their related consequences and sources.
Hackathon Journey
For us, this year’s hackathon is like no other. For the first time in three years of participation in the period of the pandemic, our team gather in one place to work cooperatively to solve global challenges and overcome the popping obstacles. For 48 hours, we had been discussing and building our solution with the help of guiding mentors that added heaps of experienced information to our experience. This, combined with the opportunity we had to interact with other competitors and share our experiences, was a totally eye-opening experience that is considered a head start on the track of innovation.
The experience of the hackathon itself was a distinctive opportunity to learn multiple skills. First of them is how rapidly interact with surprising obstacles that multiply came up into our way in the hackathon. The competition pushed us to think fast and come up with multiple solution and a variety of aspects that flourish our problem-solving skills. Secondly, we, as a team, were all in one place with the same aim to find and develop a solution for a challenging issue in a limited time. This experience improved the ability of us to teamwork and to build positive discussions that end with innovative solutions.
Thinking of what challenge to work on this year, we decided to join the “Earth Data Analysis Developers Wanted” challenge. This came after we got deep in the background of the challenge and knew the amount of observation data that is unused and how analysis of this data can help save our planet from the multiple upcoming issues. This was inspiring to the point we decided that we would build an earth observation webapp that tracks and analyze the Earth’s temperature, earth quakes, and tsunamis.
Developing this solution required multiple steps. Firstly, we started to approach the challenge and inspect the related data that was gathered in the past years. Then, we started to investigate the past solutions by SWOT analysis to determine their advantages to benefit from them for our webapp and their disadvantages to overcome and develop. These disadvantages were most concluded in lacking of user-friendly interfaces and data analysis tools that ease the user experience in understanding the data and making conclusions based on it. That was our main mission in Richmond team to develop a webapp that offer graphing and plotting tools in addition to area selection and live features that ease the user experience like no other.
The process to a distinctive solution is always full of obstacles. The biggest obstacle that faced us was that one of the distinctive web developers of the team had an unexpected circumstance that prevented him from attending the hackathon. However, we overcame this problem by transmitting the hackathon vibes and timeline to him online, so he can work with us remotely and discuss with us the final solution. The other obstacles were majorly technical, including the hardship in intervening NASA data and analyzing the dataset. However, we successfully surpassed them by much of the help of internet and the hackathon’s mentors.
To conclude, the hackathon was an enriching experience that initiated skill growth in multiple fields. It put us on the track to innovate a user-friendly earth data visualization and analyzing web app to solve the ongoing challenge of lack of efficient Earth observation data analysis tools and developers.
References
https://www.geoportal.org/?m:activeLayerTileId=osm&f:dataSource=dab
https://eodashboard.org/explore?poi=WorldCO-N1
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/andrewmvd/tsunami-dataset
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/usgs/earthquake-database
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/berkeleyearth/climate-change-earth-surface-temperature-data
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=21.37124,-128.45215&extent=52.1874,-61.56738
Tags
#Data analysis, #Models, #Web_Application, #Earth_Observation, #Disasters, #Earthquakes, #Green_Gasses, #Tsunami