Our contribution to Hack the Arctic, a hackathon to design solutions for environmental challenges.
The Policy Bear is up and running at www.policybear.gregl.it.
- We developed a prototype for a web interface to generate short and relatable sentences from climate data sets to use them in the next conference or meeting (that starts in only 10 minutes).
- The web interface enables policy-makers to create nice looking text graphics with a short sentence about the data and a comparison to a day to day measurement.
- compare concentrations of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) between different dates and observation stations within the ICOS Atmosphere network (Integrated Carbon Observation System).
- select a timeframe with either annual or monthly steps (range depends on the dataset availability)
- compare absolute or relative changes
- compare change with day-to-day measurements (we included cows and cars)
- export results as pdf or jpeg in three different beautiful themes
- share results with colleges and friends
- The data is processed in a flask-powered Python backend that we hosted on a Heroku server.
- The data is loaded directly via a Python Api of the ICOS data portal.
- The flask server can process API-calls to access specific values from the chosen dataset.
- Our python-based backend makes it easy to add all of your favourite datasets in the future.
- The frontend is a Vue.js web app with Bootstrap styling hosted on a netlify server.
- All relevant information about available datasets, timeframes and other options are retrieved vie API-calls so that no editing in the frontend is needed to add new data!
- The API-calls are made dynamically so that changes to the generated sentences can be seen instantly!
- We processed the data by taking means over all datapoints within the target period.
- Although data is available at different heights our algorithm is currently still limited to the measurement at lowest height.
- The day to day measurements comparisons are very rough estimates on the basis of general values so don't expect the most meaningful values.
- Select available ICOS stations via map viewer.
- Adding more and improving the currently available parameters to compare to.
- Including gridded datasets and more parameters (such as sea ice cover)
- Better algorithm to make comparisons more reliable.
- Improving interface and user experience of our website.