Space Apps Challenge 2018

What Is AnalIce?

AnalIce is a Tool for polar Ice data processing and visualization currently under development. It aggregates data from several accredited sources and in different formats to allow identifying causes and effects of polar ice melting for both Ice-shelf and sea-Ice.

What’s the scope of AnalIce?

The primary goal of our tool is to sensitize the user to the effect of the climate change on the polar regions and make the interest in them increase as they are an important thermometer for the health of our planet and they still might hold the key of some mysteries yet unsolved by mankind such as the formation of the planets and the galaxies.

With this tool we want to give an access to data on polar Ice as easy, smart and trustworthy as it can get. An hub where researchers, professionals and curious people can be brought together, a bridge between the research world and the public one with the Poles, for once, at the center of it. And not only this, we want to give also the possibility to process this data in a fast integrated way with a flexible interface which allows easy correlations.

Additionally we want not only to rely on the data which has been collected over the years but we want to be constantly in touch with the on-going researches on the matter of the poles region and at the same time correlating the two most extreme environments: Space and the Poles. For this reason we built a feature which allow to pick satellites and discover if and when they are next passing over the pole regions so that the user know that new data is possibly available and ready to be ANALICED.

Future works

We worked a lot on the front-end which at the moment is the strong point of our work since it had to be catchy for any user. The next thing to do is to greatly improve the backend, introducing the possibility of automatic data update and user's provided datasets. In addition several mathematical tools such as advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to support the increasing number and type of data available which is fastly become the most valuable assets with the arrival of IoT. Infact, even if the tool has been developed for the sole purpose of exploring the so-called Polar Opposites, the approach used is completely general and possibly every field involving data could one day benefit of its semplicity and interactiveness.

Finally regarding this matter, it would be definitely interesting do some data correlation and visualization not just between the two Earth poles but with other planet's one such as Mars and the Moon, to highlight similarities and differences, possibly contributing to the scientific research and general knowledge.

The source code of our tool, along with some of theprocessed relevant data used can be found on the free github repository at:

https://github.com/AndreaMalgarini/NasaSpaceApp-an...

Additionaly, links of the sources used are reported below:

https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/data.html

https://datahub.io/core/global-temp#readme

https://sealevel.nasa.gov/data/dataset/?identifier...

https://datahub.io/core/glacier-mass-balance

https://sealevel.nasa.gov/data/data-search?keyword...

http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#...

https://nsidc.org/data/g02135

https://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/master.php

The coding languages have been Java for the front end development and Python for the initial backend one.