This year, NASA’s Space Apps Challenge will feature a Surface to Air Quality Mission, which challenges people passionate about air quality to integrate satellite data, ground-based air quality data, and citizen science data to create an air quality surface that displays the most accurate data for a location and time. You can create algorithms that select or weight the best data from several sources for a specific time and location, and display that information.
Read more about the challenge here!
Sign up for the challenge here!
In short, the focus of the challenge is on three cities: Los Angeles, California, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and New Delhi, India. Ground monitoring data from government sources in all three cities is available on the OpenAQ platform. Data from NASA, EPA and the State Department are also being offered and you’re encouraged to use data from low cost centers and models. The challenge provides a set of resources and they plan to post prepackaged data for the three cities within a few days.
Specific Pointers on Using OpenAQ for the Challenge
You can dig into data from OpenAQ by following the protocol here. The data are offered “as is,” in the state that government or other sources originally shared it so you may want to use a cleaning tool. We have one made that is open-source/free. Here is a blog post explaining the tool, an intro video, and the repo on GitHub that you can use.
The great thing about this challenge is that people can get air quality data at the neighborhood scale, combine it with health and other data and take action.
So check out the challenge and form a team today to figure out this worthwhile problem. We’re here to help.
