The Challenge was to observe human shifting patterns and activity as a response to Covid-19, we have done exactly the same. Further, we have also come up with the possible ways to lessen the impact of any pandemic or epidemic that can occur in future.
Human beings have a natural tendency to look out for a safer place at times of crisis. This has been true ever since the stone age when people used to return to their own cave at the end of the day. Emotions largely over power the way of thinking during times of crisis. We saw this emotion acting strong and people shifting to their version of safer places during the Covid-19 pandemic as well. Unfortunately, this shift then accelerated the impact of Covid-19 as well.
We took data of night light images, population density, settlement. This helped us map out a possible route that people may have shifted as a result of Covid-19. We also worked on if these possible places we have taken data show response to impact of Covid-19 accordingly as well. Which it did. That predicted place was the next hot spot in real life as well.
Thus, our project made use of the Earth observatory data and predicted the possible route and cross checked with actual media coverage of that place, which all aligned perfectly.
Choosing this Challenge:
Both of us team members are from Nepal. Our education is such that students think science is nothing more than old bulky books that have huge equations. Even the class toppers are taught in a way that if they memorize the derivation of theorems and solve the given bookish problem, they are successful. We never could agree with this thought.
We wanted to inspire the upcoming generation of students here that science much more than books. One of the team members, Sachin has a big teenage and youth following. He was selected as the best teenager in the country in 2017 and is the only person from Nepal to ever receive “Distinguished Student Award” from New York Academy of Sciences.
Light the Path was that challenge, that could be turned into something alluring. The night time images of earth. Process of tracking movements could be really attractive to the next generation. Further unlike our books, We could work on data that can be put into use real time to give an effective outcome.
From the very first day we started posting about this challenge in our social media handles and more and more youths from Nepal joined in the Space App challenge. So, in one way we choosing this challenge was worth it.
What our approach to developing this project?
48 hours is not enough time to analyze data of all the countries of the world. So we narrowed it down to 1 country, which was Nepal. Nepal is located in between China and India, both of which are two biggest countries in the world and are affected by corona virus. Inside we worked on a district called Banke which has now the highest amount of Corona Virus suffering people. but also look after the data of two of the bigger populations at the same time.
Then we listed out the Earth observatory data we needed to analyze the shifting. These were nightlight images, settlement data and population density. Since Banke is small in area we could analyze each of these data sets in our 48 hours time frame of hackathon with relative ease.
Now when we had location, time and shifting data of Nepal. We worked on making possible policies for the authorities to help minimize the effect of any future pandemic.
Finally, we made sure the models we took, the process we followed, can we modeled in any country around the globe and the policies we suggested could be replicated by any other country. Thus, taking our solution from local to global.
How did we use space agency data in your project?
We looked upon all the resources provided along with the challenge and then narrowed it down to the ones we needed for our process. Following were the space agency data we used:
These two data sets helped us see the spread of population and possible areas people were living in inside the country.
We added a rectangle area around Nepal, including land borders of India and China from which people could walk into Nepal.
Followed by the data from the GOES-8, we also looked into land surface temperature form the G-Portal.
Tools we used to read the data were:
Here, we added a layer of all 1, 2 and 3 satellites mentioned above followed by some base layers like Coast lines, Earth Night time light and few others.
2. https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search
Here, we added a rectangular area in Nepal and also including land borders in North to China and South to India, though people could still shift in during the time of covid 19. Then we looked into data of GOES - 9 from this tool.
3. Globe Portal System from Jaxa
We used this system to look into data of GCOM-C (Shikisai) and analyze the land surface area temperature.
Other tools:
Since our end product was going to be plans and policies so we did not have to code or develop any new sites or apps. We made use of Rocket chat, to find team members. Find the mentor. Then we used facebook messenger for voice calls with the team and mentor. Finally, everything came together in Google doc, where we wrote the data and built up the final report.
What problems and achievements our team have?
This was the first time we were working on data from satellites. The entire first day went on figuring out how the worldview and the search. earthdata worked. Our mentor was of great help in figuring that out.
Problem was that every new website we used to log into to look for data, the site had really good User Interface but not proper navigation. That lit up a new idea in our team’s mind. After this challenge is done, we might make videos on how to navigate open data websites easily.
It was 1 at night yesterday and we were totally messed up, not knowing what to do next. We had lost the enthusiasm, because of continuous analyzing of data. Then we watched the launch of Dragon Crew. We were on messenger call watching it live from our homes. We all stood up and clapped for the launch. That lit a spark within us. There was this voice saying, if they can launch people into space we can solve this data riddle. We will always remember this moment if we ever get stuck doing anything in life and feel like we cannot do it. This was definitely one of the biggest achievements.