Data Scouts - Space Apps Challenge

Data Scouts| Quiet Planet

Quiet Planet

The COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting social distancing recommendations and related restrictions have led to numerous short-term changes in economic and social activity around the world, all of which may have impacts on our environment. Your challenge is to use space-based data to document the local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19 and the associated societal responses.

Universal data analyzing platform

Summary

At the moment we've made a web application capable of hosting various researches and providing them with automatically generated charts and tools to analyze them. With the help of it, we`ve completed two pieces of research using data from NASA Earth Observatory about the connection between aerosol optical thickness, nitrogen dioxide level and COVID-19 spread.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Your challenge is to use space-based data to document the local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19 and the associated societal responses. In addition to changes in the atmosphere/land/water/ice, how might you leverage Earth observations to explore changes in Earth-related attributes (such as land use, land cover, and other characteristics) in response to COVID-19?

Our project provides tools for researchers, helping them analyze progressing dataset changes, as well as allows hosting of those. It can be used to document any changes, but for COVID-19 we`ve implemented a system that can compare different graphs, find their similarities and differences and provide a conclusion about the connection between the data and the pandemic.

Also, it already includes some pieces of research, which were made using NASA datasets and partially tools, as well as our own platform. This way this project includes some information about the changes.

Although our platform is already capable of providing help to the researches, there's still room to improve. In order to scale this project, advanced analysis tools, API/user interface, research database can be added.

How We Developed This Project

We chose this challenge because it seemed to be the only one we can fully complete with our current skills. Each member of our team did a different task. Yura Sharko was responsible for finding data, I (Bohdan Yankovskyi) did the research and wrote some minor scripts, as well as filled this page. Ivan Zadvornov was our main programmer, writing the web application, including front-end, back-end, charts and most of the dataset processing.

Space agency data was used as the main source of information about environmental changes. We used Python for the dataset processing, Javascript for both back-end and front-end (Node.js + React.js). Also, we used NASA-made tools, mostly NEO Analyze tool for some manual research.

Our main problem was probably lack of communication because we had to work from home. Also, we had a hard time finding viable CSV datasets. As we wanted to focus rather on the project then on the data, CSV was the only dataset type we wanted to use, because of ease of handling it.

We find the graph tool our main technical achievement, as it can transform a series of datasets into a chart, and then compare those in order to provide some conclusion about their similarity, while our main overall achievement is the results of our researches.