It is to be mentioned that four out of six group members have participated in a competition organized by IEEE BRACU Student Branch in the “Independent Analytics” section and achieved the second position among 18 academic institutions in Bangladesh. This achievement encouraged us to participate in a big platform like COVID-19 SPACE APPS CHALLENGE.
How our project addresses the given challenges:
Findings from the challenge that we took and the model which we are proposing:
Looking at the values of the aerosol optical thickness over 500nm across both land and ocean in April 2019 and April 2020, it is clearly visible that the emission of aerosol has significantly gone down in year 2020. This can be linked up with the cause of COVID-19 pandemic. Combustible aerosols which are a result of biomass, domestic fires and industrial emissions and traffic is being less emitted due to lock down being enforced across countries in every region. So, both the production as well as spread of aerosol have reduced which are clearly visible from the graphs provided. From this information, we can infer that the human activity is less, causing less industrial activity to be taking place. This can be backed up by looking at the drastic change in the turnover index of countries between the years 2019 and 2020. Most of the countries have a negative change in the turnover index, implying that employees have been laid off from the services including people working in industries. So, along with Earth Observatory data and social-economic data comparison before and during the COVID-19, portrays the impacts of these parameters which gives us an enhanced insight into tackling problems due to this pandemic.
SO2 surface mass concentrations which are mainly produced by burning of fossil fuels, have a slight reduction in 2020 when compared with the graphs of 2019. The spread of SO2 have also seen a good reduction due to the fact that human movements through vehicles have decreased. One such aspect is looking at the number of passengers on board in the aviation sector of different countries between 2019 and 2020. Less and less people have boarded in 2020. Flights which are a significant means of travel burn gallons of fossil fuel per trip. A reduction in passengers imply, less flights have operated in order to prevent COVID-19 from spreading across various regions.
The effect of CO is not very identical in comparison with March, 2019 and March, 2020. The extreme CO generating regions does not change in emission much whereas it is observed that the whole world is neutralizing the emission amount of CO in March, 2020. CO and SO2 concentration has impacts on the temperature which can be potential contributors towards global warning. So, if we take a look at the temperature change during 2019 and 2020, we’ll get a better insight. If we closely interpret the maps demonstrating the temperature anomalies of March, 2020 and March,2019 it is clearly indicating the global warming in March, 2019 as the temperature scale goes up to 15(K) whereas for March,2020 the highest scale for temperature is 9(K). Thus, COVID-19 has a direct impact in reducing global warming.
The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is a simple graphical indicator that can be used to analyze and assessing whether or not the target location being observed contains live green vegetation.
It is interpreted that mostly China, North America and South America regions has shown positive impacts in live green vegetation in comparison with February, 2020 and February, 2019. Hence, COVID-19 can be the main reason to positive change in the parameter NDVI. As, primarily lockdown or government laws has implemented for a notable time period in these regions for preventing COVID-19 impact.
Import Prices have fluctuated substantially between years 2019 and 2020. Mostly this has seen a downward trend among countries and a rarely positive change in only a few countries. This can be related to the fact that industries, as well as other social-economic activities have reduced drastically. So, the inventory of the existing products that were already produced beforehand are lying idle in industries. In order to get the products sold, countries have reduced import prices through TAX reductions, etc. All these are directly linked up due to COVID-19 putting a pause button in our lives in this world. Alongside import prices, we can take into account exchange rates of different countries. However this parameter has no significant changes due to the fact that every country is facing problems due to the COVID-19 as everyone failed to take necessary steps in the nick of time. So, as a whole there was very negligible fluctuations, which can be seen from the graphical analysis of 2019 and 2020.
We have been working on COVID-19 datasets for a competition that we had participated a couple of a days back, and we had attained unprecedented success at that competition. Our main goal was to efficiently make integrated assessments on the datasets that we had on hand. Working on that made us feel that we were capable of taking on a heavier challenge that incorporated even greater data. This inspired us to choose this challenge.
We had a very simple approach. First of all, we figured out what sort of skills were required to complete this project satisfying the challenges. So, we split the task accordingly. Then each member who specialized on those particular skill sets, did their part and finally everything was compiled and necessary interpretations were made from the data. After compilation everything came together to form a solid project.
We took some specific space agency data from the available resources that was provided, particularly sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, NVDI ,aerosol, etc which was taken based on monthly observations over a period of 1-2 years to make necessary comparisons.
Tools that were used to make this challenge a success are RStudio and Pycharm. The languages that were chosen were R programming language and Python. The software that were used were Jupyter Notebook, Google Colab.
There were some difficulties that we faced while working with the datasets. Particularly slicing time dimensions proved difficult as the datasets had mean monthly values. Another problem that we faced was picking out datasets as to which would provide the best insights to our challenge. As for the achievements, we have been successfully made interpretations from the factors that we chose with the impact of the COVID-19. Apart from that we were able to work with space data of different formats which we previously never encountered before. We were able to make some life-long cherish-able memories and for two days to escape into virtual reality to fight for a global cause working remotely.
The youtube link for the video.
The google drive link containing the pictures of the proposed project.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YdvDYQ-RUWsEf6oZ59RI_bVBobgb9_F1?usp=sharing
Reference:
1. https://www.kaggle.com/therealcyberlord/coronavirus-covid-19-visualization-prediction?fbc=
4. https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/dataset/OEEyFHYAWVNRYGMFhUzzw
5. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/sts_inpi_q
6. https://data.europa.eu/euodp/data/dataset/gFPkNAQVAPLBT21ZhKTQ
7. https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data