The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a natural experiment in how our environment responds to changes in pollutant emissions from various sources. Reduced transportation and industrial activity has led to a decline in fossil fuel emissions which has likely contributed to changes in air and water quality, leading to increased biodiversity. COVID Call for Action (CC4A) is an educational resource that documents space-based, geospatial, and socioeconomic data during the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim of advocating for environmental solutions. Using data collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA), CC4A allows users to visualize, manipulate, and chart local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19. In addition, socioeconomic data includes the amount of COVID-19 cases a country has, the amount of deaths, and the percentage of its citizens that have claimed unemployment. A user can input coordinates to obtain data specific to their region. This data can be used to populate a letter template to send to their local leaders urging them to enact environmental policies such as increased renewable energy sources and stricter environmental regulations.
In New York City:
This information can be used to populate such as this one to local representatives.
The Earth Optimists team was inspired to use space-based and geospatial data to connect the scientific community and our nation’s policy-makers. We created Covid Call for Action (CC4A) to educate and motivate citizens to advocate for improved environmental policies in their community.
Utilizing the cloud-based data catalog hosted through Google Earth Engine, we used data from NASA, ESA, and NOAA satellites to document how environmental and societal metrics changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed air quality (NO2), water quality (chlorophyll-a), socioeconomic factors (# of cases, unemployment rates), biodiversity (NDVI), and night-time lights. These metrics were chosen because they represented issues COVID-19 can impact.
We developed Google Earth Engine scripts (Javascript) to create interactive maps. We extracted data by point locations in each dataset to create time series plots using Python. The draft site for CC4A was made using Flask/Python with HTML. The videos were made using Screen-casitfy and Adobe Spark. Further improvements will be added to create a final, public website with the ability to extract data from any user-specified location.
The major challenges our team faced was the lack of updated data in the Earth Engine Catalog. For instance, VIIRS nighttime light dataset stopped at January 2020, and MODIS AQUA chlorophyll stopped in April 2020 prohibiting us from analyzing more recent data. Another challenge was showcasing the Earth Engine Apps. The Apps are not able to be implemented into a website, therefore we decided to take screen recordings of the user functionality and include that into our 30 second video.
An achievement of our team was bringing together everyone's expertise, virtually! From using JavaScript to map and download data, to using Python to creating time series, to organizing the data on a Flask/Python-hosted site, our team accomplished a large-scale data analysis that can be used to make change.
View the video to our project here!
Environmental Data:
Socioeconomic Data: