OpenNEX Challenge Phase II
Image Credit:
NASA
NASA
has selected four ideas from the public for innovative uses of climate
projections and Earth-observing satellite data. The agency also has announced a
follow-on challenge with awards of $50,000 to build climate applications based
on OpenNEX data on the Amazon cloud computing platform.
Both challenges use the Open NASA Earth Exchange, or OpenNEX, a data, cloud
computing, and knowledge platform where users can share modeling and analysis
codes, scientific results, information and expertise to solve big data
challenges in the Earth sciences. OpenNEX provides users a large collection of
climate and Earth science satellite data sets, including global land surface
images, vegetation conditions, climate observations and climate projections.
The four winners of the "ideation" stage of the OpenNEX challenge, which ran
from July 1 through Aug. 1, will share a $10,000 award for their ideas on novel
uses of the datasets. Abdal Elhassani of Indiana University, Bloomington,
proposed an app to predict how plant hardiness zones will change in the future
with a changing climate. Edward Aboufadel of Grand Valley State University,
Allendale, Michigan, suggested using the data to compare a local community's
future predicted climate with the historical record of another community.
A team led by Raymond Milowski of San Francisco proposed converting the
storehouse of OpenNEX climate model data to formats compatible with the Open Web
Platform to facilitate wider use by web developers. Reuben Cummings from Peoria,
Illinois, suggested a web application to map potential and actual
climate-related environmental hazards such as wildfires, flood, and drought
across the United States.
"The ideas generated by this OpenNEX challenge demonstrate the value of these
NASA data assets when put in the hands of citizen scientists," said Ramakrishna
Nemani, principal scientist for the NEX project at NASA's Ames Research Center
in Moffett Field, California. "Our second challenge seeks to rapidly turn these
ideas into practical applications."
The second "builder" challenge that opens Friday offers awards for the
development of an application or algorithm that communicates climate change
impacts to the general public using the OpenNEX data. Submissions based on the
winning proposals in the "ideation" challenge are encouraged, in addition to new
ideas that focus on climate change impacts.
Applications should communicate through concise summaries of impacts over
time that can be easily related to familiar climate-related events and
processes. The summaries may rely on key climatic events or observable events
dependent on climate, such as changes in the timing of snow melt and runoff,
plant flowering and the start of the allergy season, and the annual migration of
birds. Developers are not limited to these examples, and are encouraged to
consider solutions that incorporate other scientifically-based climate summaries
and analogs.
“NASA is committed to engaging and enabling individuals and groups to make
use of these high-quality scientific data and innovative technologies to better
communicate climate change impacts to the general public," said Tsengdar Lee,
program manager in the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate
at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Entries are due by Oct. 21 and NASA plans to announce the winners on Dec.
15.
NASA's OpenNEX challenge ties in to a number of White House initiatives,
including Open Data, Big Data and Climate Data. These initiatives advance
national goals to address climate change impacts on economic growth, health and
livelihood, and include the use of competitions and challenges to foster
regional innovation.
The challenges are managed by NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative
Innovation. The center was established in coordination with the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy to advance NASA’s open innovation
efforts and extend that expertise to other federal agencies. The challenges are
released on the NASA Innovation Pavilion, one of the center's platforms
available to NASA team members, through its contract with InnoCentive, Inc.
To educate citizen scientists about how the data on OpenNEX can be used, NASA
has created a series of online video lectures and hands-on lab modules. To view
this material, and for information on registering for the challenges, visit:
OpenNEX is hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and available to the
public through a Space Act Agreement. Challenge developers are eligible for
credits on the AWS platform to build their applications.
NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of
satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA
develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems
with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our
planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global
community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world
that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.
For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014,
visit:
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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