High-Level Project Summary
We design an informative app that seeks to give an indication of the variability of rainfall patterns in future years for the public as well as farmers. This app will highlight the effect of climate change on crop yields.We used the OLYMPEX rainfall data as from Washington state as well as historical data from the national weather service to train an algorithm on rainfall in Washington state. We notice an increase in variability over the years. We intend to train our algorithm on data from a diverse set of regions and predict future variability and its effect on crop yields around the world. This will be a great way to raise awareness and incite climate action.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Climate Change is one of if not THE MOST important issue affecting the world right now
Climate change covers many topics including: global warming, intense drought, changing rainfall patterns, storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and warming oceans to name a few. These changes can cause major issues such as food security!
There is a lot of uncertainty in crop yields due to variability of weather caused by Climate change. Washington state’s wheat production has varied between 3.8-5.2 Tonnes of wheat/ha per year in the past 11 years. This variability is huge considering there are 684000 Hectares of harvested land. A major factor in crop yields is the rainfall patterns in a particular year.
Our app aims to provide insights into previous years rainfall patterns and the effect they have had on crop yields in a locality as well as predicting future rainfall patterns and yields to highlight the effect of climate change. This app is for public use but in particular can be used by farmers or rural communities which depend on rainfall for a livelihood to gauge conditions for next year and expected crop yields.
We currently use limited data for a specific locality (Washington state) and specific crop (wheat) to train an algorithm that can predict these trends for future, but we aim to expand this to every climate region in the world.
The app will help raise global awareness on how climate change can directly affect communities and can also be a catalyst to accelerate climate action by governments around the world.
Space Agency Data
We used the OLYMPEX rainfall data from 2015-2016 along with data from the National Weather Service in Washington State to observe variability of rainfall over time. We notice an increasing trend in variability over decade long time spans. We also use wheat yield data for Washington state. Our intention is to pass this data through a machine learning algorithm to help train it and turn it into a prediction tool that can predict how crop yields might be affected in coming years due to varying rainfall patterns.
Hackathon Journey
We learnt how to extract data from different file types as well as how to locate weather data on the internet. We were very inspired by the usefulness of this challenge to the current world. We split up work between us and talked through any problems we each encountered . Would love to thank Conrad Pires for his efforts in organising the event.
References
Tags
#Climate #airborne