Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

I See Climate Change

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Image Credit: NASA

Project: https://www.iseechange.org/

Climate change is a poorly understood phenomenon primarily because verifying its local impact on day-to-day weather patterns is highly difficult due to the scarcity of granular data. Fortunately, that is changing with the introduction of the iSeeChange Tracker app that first emerged as an independent online weather journal in 2012, but has now transformed in to a hybrid citizen science, social-media project. As a result of the partnership with NASA, local communities are now being empowered to observe record and contribute data on how weather and climate affect their environment.

Every time you notice a change in the weather or climate in your local area, you could easily record your observations through your smartphone and send the data to NASA, where researchers and environmentalists will analyze these ground-level changes and compare it with their observations coming through satellites in space. The collaboration through iSeeChange Tracker app between ordinary citizen scientists across the world and researchers at NASA will improve the data currently available on the trends in climate change. iSeeChange Tracker app would serve as a collective climate journal where citizen scientists like you can collaborate with research teams by sending in geotagged photos of the weather at your locality. These geotagged photos alongside the information on daily weather and atmospheric changes would significantly help us all understand climate change better.

The observations posted on iSeeChange Tracker by citizen scientists are highly diverse: from the blossoming of flowers to the unexpected migration of birds. The tiniest of changes in the environment are quickly documented. Some users post their own questions and speculations about the changes that they are experiencing and that often leads to further discussion and investigation that helps the scientific community learn more about the bizarre changes in the environment.

Data being sent in by community-based citizen scientists is a tremendous help in analyzing important aspects of the changes occurring in the environment, for example, things like early spring, flooding, rising temperatures or changes in landscapes are now more easier to record. Citizen Scientists using the iSeeChange Tracker app are therefore playing a central role in the data collection process. Your participation in this citizen science project would be of immense importance. Scientists at NASA use the data you submit to spot trends, find patterns and come up with solutions that might prevent the rapid threatening changes in the global environment.

iPhone and Android users can easily download the iSeeChange Tracker app for free. The app also comes with multiple language support.

Take Action on Climate Change

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Project: Climate CoLab

The Climate CoLab has launched a set of contests seeking high-impact proposals on how people, organizations and governments can tackle major climate change challenges. Entries can win prizes — including a $10,000 cash award and a chance to present at MIT — and also feed into larger climate action plans for countries and the whole world, which the community will build on the platform later this year.

“The mission of the Climate CoLab is to test how crowds and experts can work together to solve large, complex problems, like climate change,” says MIT Sloan Professor Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and founder of the Climate CoLab.

In the first stage of the project, anyone can submit proposals for how to tackle ten major climate challenges. Each proposal will be evaluated for the impact the proposal would have on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Winners will be chosen in each contest.

In the second stage, opening later this year, people can package different proposals together to form national and global climate strategies that use simplified climate models to estimate the GHG reductions that would result.

The MIT lab ran a pilot contest on this approach in 2015, with Henry Paulson, former U.S. Secretary of Treasury and former CEO of Goldman Sachs; Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute (WRI); and Janos Pasztor, then-current United Nations Assistant Secretary-General on Climate Change, overseeing the global contest as advisors.

Last year, some of the winning proposals submitted to the platform included:

Submissions are due before May 23, 2016, 8:00 PM Eastern Time. To submit a proposal, or read and comment on other proposals, see http://climatecolab.org.

Photo credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio via Wikimedia Commons. Story credit: MIT press release.

Don’t Just Talk About The Weather… Document It.

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Photo credit: Public domain image via Wikipedia Commons.

Project: iSeeChange: The Almanac

For decades, anyone who relies on the weather for a living has depended on almanacs, those annual calendars with weather statistics and tables, to roughly predict the current weather. But with climate change making patterns harder and harder to suss, a new project called iSeeChange wants you to help document what’s going on to create a living almanac.

Started by Julia Kumari Drapkin at the Colorado public station KVNF, the project is going nation wide, and is designed to combine citizen science, public media, and satellite and sensor monitoring of environmental conditions. Specifically, the project is joining forces with the NASA mission Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2, to provide “ground truth” or ground-level observations in conjunction with satellite measurements of CO2 levels.

“Combining these two perspectives—a global view of the earth from space and a granular view from individuals on the ground—offers an unprecedented opportunity to match big science with daily life, and surface hidden patterns and stories.”

To participate, you simply need to create a login for the site, and post what you have noticed going on in your area. This might be an observation about the arrival of the first dandelions being very early, or the fact that you have noticed several bird species overwintering that never have before. You could also write about what’s thriving or not in your garden, how the local frog and toad population seems to be faring, and so on.

The site has a trailer on the Get Involved page that helps to illustrate the project’s purpose. For more information, you can also contact Julia at iseechange@kvnf.org.

 

 

 

Data Rescue

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Photo Credit: Niklas Bildhauer via Wikiamedia Commons
Photo Credit: Niklas Bildhauer via Wikiamedia Commons

Project: Data Rescue @ Home

Pity the poor, unloved bit of historical data: Unloved, unanalysed, and *gasp* analog, instead of digital. Brother, can you spare some time?

The Data Rescue @ Home project would like your help in digitizing historical weather data, to help researchers better understand climate change. The project is currently working with two historical data sources: German radiosonde data from the Second World War and meteorological station data from Tulagi (Solomon Islands) from the first half of the 20th century.

The WWII data includes measurements from Germany, France, Danmark, Italy, Poland, Austria and Estonia. Geodynamic height, temperature and relative humidity were recorded from 1000 hPa to 50 hPa.

The Tulagi data measurements include air pressure, dry and wet bulb temperature, maximum and minimum temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed, cloud cover, weather, and precipitation amount.

According to the website, “The old data are expected to be very useful for different international research and reanalysis projects (e.g. the Twentieth Century Reanalysis, new surface temperature datasets), and the prolongation of the currently available observational series into the past is of crucial importance for our understanding of the climate system.”

The project is a joint effort between the University of Bern and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

To participate, simply use the registration link at the top of the project’s website, and start digitizing/transcribing the data presented. You’ll be doing valuable work to help us deal with one of the most urgent problems of the 21st century.