Coral Beat

Develop a web tool, mobile device app or add-on for existing apps or websites that leverages NASA imagery and climate data to illustrate the impacts of our changing Earth in areas of interest to you. Some ideas to explore include:

• Use NASA Earth observations data, social media, smart phones, and Short Message Service (SMS) text phones to collect Earth observations and connect public in local, regional, and national networks to communicate about our changing planet.
• Examine current natural events curated by NASA’s EONET (Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker) by browsing global historical and near real-time imagery from space.
• Upload images or other data points demonstrating visible observations and how they compare to satellite data. For example, generating early-warning alerts or validating precipitation rates reported from NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement Mission.
• Integrate NASA imagery with a mobile assistant to allow for dynamic image generation based on a basic request structure.

The coral reefs are sending us a message. Environmental changes are stressing the corals to a point of starvation. When corals are exposed to water that is too warm, they expel the algae living in their tissues, and this causes the corals to turn white or bleach. Corals play an integral role in the health of our ocean ecosystem. It is also the home of millions of marine species and has a direct influence on Hawaii’s tourism economy.

We offer CoralBeat.org to local residents, visitors, and the science community to monitor the short and long-term effects of bleaching. With CoralBeat.org, a viewer can zoom into a coastal region around Hawaii to see the areas most impacted by coral bleaching. Upon closer inspection, a user can explore geo-referenced observations of impacted corals. Other interactive multimedia site functionality includes photos, videos and an interactive 3D reef scan.

CoralBeat (a reference to “heartbeat”) is an app focused on coral bleaching in Hawaii. Interactive mapping functionality includes years of NASA satellite data records depicting sea surface temperatures observed over the entire globe. An animation in the app shows how the ocean has warmed during the most recent El Niño event.

CoralBeat.org also used photos and videos provide by NOAA and the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology. Data from Earth's very own coral reefs, collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, are featured in an interactive map that allows the viewer to explore the impact the recent coral bleaching event in Hawaii.

Full team roster: McKay Davis, Noah Pomeroy, Yukio Yamamoto, Ouida Meier, Brad Baris, Karen Tanigawa, Melanie Abecassis, Russell Vea, Trung Lam, Burt Lum