Space Apps Challenge 2018

Reasons and Goals:

World Health Organisation defines non-communal respiratory deceases as one of the primary sources of impact on human wellbeing. There are many factors - both natural and human-originated - that impact the quality of the air we breath.

With the modern instruments deployed in space and on the ground we can observe and collect wast amounts of data on the quality of the air we breath and impacts on our health. We can see the dynamics and complex relationships between Nature and human actions.

In addition to the primary goal of informing application users about potential changes in quality of air we wanted to have an opportunity to demonstrate and educate users about the direct impact the changes in climate make on everyday life.

Background:

AirAlert is a business and professional-oriented application that uses data available on Earth climate and air quality to predict future impact on health.

For many businesses and organisations the knowledge about such a simple matter can be critical:

• In the kindergarten - can we let kids play outside or they might have health problems tomorrow?
• In the pharmacy - should we expect a rise in asthma-related prescriptions and stock up?
• In the beach rental business - do I need to open shop tomorrow or the people will stay inside?

Sources and methods:

The application may use multiple data sources to build a model of air quality and predict the change of the situation.

As the primary source the data from NASA GEOS-5.

For illustrative purposes the model is pre-trained on the island of Cyprus with several known major sources of air pollutants.

The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/valentinalexeev/2018SAC-airaler...

Challenges:

To create an application a totally new stack was selected to build data pipeline, analysis and prediction models.

Next steps:

The application is relevant in the daily life of every business. In addition to a website new interfaces can be added to ease the use:

• mobile applications for business owners,
• early warning notification systems for health organisations and risk group patients,
• IoT devices to visualize the predicted state of air quality.

The use of GEOS-5 is only one potential source of relevant data. The application can use additional elements to adapt the model including other space-based instruments as well as the ground-based components.

CREDITS:

Title image photo by Thomas Millot on Unsplash.