Earth Care

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.

Natural disasters affect millions of people worldwide. The 2016 Houston Flood has thousands of people’s home and more than $14 million in damage. How to stay informed about natural disasters and whether your beloved family and friends are affected?

Earth Care notifies you in real time when your friends are in the vicinity of a natural disaster, big or small, across the country and around the globe, and allows you to explore the natural disaster in greater depth through dynamic visualization of big data, and observed how the local communities are impacted by such dramatic events.

• The real-time disaster notification service is powered by NASA EONET natural event tracker. By providing your friends' location information (or connect with facebook to get the location of your friends), Earth Care extracts data from EONET in real time and automatically issues a notification to you if you friends are nearby.
• To let you continuously monitor the progress of a natural disaster, Earth Care visualizes the disaster on a map view with local weather overlays recreated from NASA GPM high-resolution precipitation data. You can navigate in time to explore the changes in the weather pattern before and after the disaster.
• To further illustrate the social impact on local communities, Earth Care leverages Twitter data and Google trend data to explore general public's reaction towards the disaster through dynamic visualization of news and photos related to the event. Social sentiment analysis and search interest correlation analysis are also included to draw further insight on the social impact.

Because the data sources of Earth Care come from NASA and social media that are replenished in real time, the application can keep track of the natural disasters automatically. Furthermore it allows you to get an overview of all ongoing natural disasters in the world. In the future we plan to include more types of natural disasters, and different types of climate data to allow the user to explore.

We are a group of software developers, designers and data scientists who are enthusiastic about social innovation. Aware of the fact that lots of natural disasters receive limited coverage in the news, the goal of developing Earth Care is to educate people about natural disaster and build empathy about the changing earth through understanding how it affect their family, friends and the local people.

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/sM97cGg3WOvyTM

Demo: www.bit.ly/earth-care (Overview page)

Data Sources:

• NASA EONET - http://eonet.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/
• NASA IMERG GPM data - http://pmm.nasa.gov/
• Google Trend data
• Google Correlation
• Twitter Data
• facebook

Tools:

• IBM Bluemix http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/
• SAP HANA https://hana.sap.com/abouthana.htm

We would like to thank those who have supported us during the journey despite their busy obligations

• Yao Liu, Michael Brown, Dane Christensen
  Sandra Moerch-Petersen, Ben Christensen
• SAP University Alliance