High-Level Project Summary
Heat stress and air pollution impact negatively human health and ecological systems.Heat waves are often associated with droughts that lead to forest fires that have multi-billion-dollar impacts on national and global societiesWe developed a tool to detect, around the globe, the heat stressed and air polluted cities. The tool also monitors forests for a potential risk of fire.It is very important to provide early warning that can save governments billion of dollars and help save people lives. The tool also provides mitigation actions and guidance that will help the government and societies stay safe.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
The tool is able to detect, around the globe:
-Heat stressed areas: Areas where the temperature is high and negatively affect the health of humans
-Air quality index (AQI): Measure the pollution and notify the citizens when pollution is detected
-Wild fire risk in forest: Detect beforehand the possibility of a wild fire in forests.
At the end, our Solution offer guidance on mitigation measures to be taken to stay safe
The tool uses crowdsourced weather data from http://weatherapi.com and soil moisture data form NASA GSFC: https://gimms.gsfc.nasa.gov/SMOS/SMAP/ to detect heat stressed polluted areas and to analyze the risk of fires in the forest
Heat Stress intensity is monitored around the globe, simply choose a country and the platform will classify major cities in this country by their heat stress level. A forecast for the next 3 days is also available.
The platform also monitors Air quality index around the globe by classifying the cities according to their pollution level
To estimate if a wild fire is about to occur in a forest the tool proceeds by detecting the forest in a map of an area and analyses the data of that area to estimate the risk of fire occurrence. A fire can occur if the below is true:?
- Temperature: High Temperature
- Humidity: Low humidity
-Wind: High wind speed
- Root soil moisture: lower soil moisture is obtained from NASA GSFC indicates if the soil at the level of the roots is low on moisture. Soil moisture anomaly (the amount that current soil moisture conditions, at the depth of plant roots, deviate from the historical average) is also obtained and high values indicates potential drought. Research from NASA has showed a strong correlation between the timing and location of low soil moisture and the occurrence of wildfire. Dried plants become fuel for the fire.
We hope to achieve an automated early alert system to warn the government and societies about the risks at hand and to offer them mitigation advice on how to stay safe and when it is time to be fully ready to protect the forests in the area.
The tool was developed using Microsoft VB.Net, SQL and HTML language programming, Openstreetmaps was used to navigate through maps, openweatherapi.com was used to get heat stressed and polluted areas, NASA soil moisture data was used to detect the risk of wildfires
Space Agency Data
NASA GFSC data (The Goddard Space Flight Center) was used to get the sub soil moisture level , the soil moisture profile and sub soil moisture anomaly to help detect the risk of fire
https://gimms.gsfc.nasa.gov/SMOS/SMAP/
Detecting a spike in soil moisture anomaly usually indicate drought, dried and stressed plants.
Add to it a low soil moisture profile, a very high temperature and a high wind speed is usually a recipe for fire.
Hackathon Journey
The space app experience was a fun and great experience, we were surprised by the amount and quality of data NASA collects from planet earth and we got to understand more our planet functioning and the impact of our behavior on the planet
We chose this challenge because global warming is real and it is starting to affect human beings and our planet earth.
We did a lot of research and we had a hard time collecting all the data, especially that we needed a lot of live data.
At the end, we aim to raise awareness that heat stress, air pollution and forest fires are a real threat to people and our planet.
References
Data and resources
https://gimms.gsfc.nasa.gov/SMOS/SMAP/
https://weatherapi.com
https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/our-impact/news/nasa-tracks-link-between-soil-moisture-and-fire-susceptibility-california
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
Tools:
Microsoft visual studio
Microsoft SQL Local DB
Chromium Browser Plugin
Visual studio code
Photoshop for pictures editing
Canva.com for video editing
Tags
#globalwarming, #riskofforestfire, #heatStress, #airpollution, #wildfire, #climatechange, #forestsprotection, #nasaearth
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.