High-Level Project Summary
We have developed a desktop app. The aim of this app is to raise awareness within people, to show them that our planet's way has to turn direction.We have used NASA’s satellite-observed data to show the enormous amount of natural disasters that are happening right now, most of them by our fault, with their respective risks. We have also used the Zaragoza Council’s API in order to get the pollution data of our city (if we had a longer time of investigation we could think about including other cities). We show this data to the user letting him/her know the amount of pollution in each city district. With our app we want to make easier to access data for people.Note: Zaragoza is our home city
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Our application has a simple Graphic User Interface, the user selects the city where he/she wants to know of and the app shows the data.
If the user selects “Zaragoza” for example, the application will show him/her a pollution map, calculated by Zaragoza pollution stations data with the council’s api, with the selected data (polluting gas).
The user can also interact with the maps. If the user selects a type of natural disaster, the app shows him/her a map with all natural disasters of the selected type in the world, showing a little description of each one.
Furthermore, you can request the app to show up a map with all natural disasters that are near you. You can also ask for a mapamundi with all active natural disasters.
Data (from the Zaragoza’s Council and from NASA’s API) is given in .json format. We use python and processing to handle these files and to build the maps to show them to the user.
API’S URLS:
Council’s Api → https://www.zaragoza.es/ciudad/medioambiente/atmosfera/redconta/horas_CalidadAire?estacion=38&contaminante=1&fecha=02%2F10%2F2021
NASA’s API → https://eonet.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/api/v2.1/events?status=open & https://eonet.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/api/v2.1/categories/{ID}
OPENWEATHER API → https://openweathermap.org/api/one-call-api
Ok but, do we need the openweather api? Yes. Openweather api is used to transform the city name to coordinates [lat,lon] and these are the coordinates which are given into python for querying NASA’s api for the location’s data.
Python handles the data and introduces it into the map, then it shows the map to the user.
In Zaragoza’s case, the process it’s a little bit more difficult. Data from council’s api is given to Processing by Python, processing builds the pollution map with the data given and gives the built map to Python that shows it to the user.
The app is built by using GTK (https://www.gtk.org/). For this reason it is available for almost all computers.
As we see, our app aims to give people access to the information about earth health. NASA’s satellites and local weather stations collect lots of information about the weather and the climate change such as pollution levels. But this information is not as accessible as it could be, for this reason we developed this data visualizer.
Space Agency Data
We have used the NATURAL PHENOMENONS TRACKING API in two modes:
https://eonet.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/api/v2.1/events?status=open & https://eonet.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/api/v2.1/categories/{ID}
The first one is used to get all the active natural disasters in the world, then this data is shorted or not: If we have selected to see the hole world map with of natural disasters, we won’t have to short the data, but if we choose to know the nearest natural disasters of a city, we will have to short the data to show only the natural disasters near the city.
The second one is used to get the natural disasters shortened by type (hurricanes, floods, icebergs…) and then showing them to the user in the map.
Hackathon Journey
Today has been a great day. It’s a shame that we couldn’t be gathered like other years, vibing with other people and networking but the online space was quite great.
We have learnt lots of things like api’s, python libraries, nasa’s apis, satellites data… I think I will never forget this day.
References
Tags
#climatechange #environmentalissues #naturaldisasters #mapinformation #satelliteobservations #weathertracking
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.