Los Agronautas| A Flood of Ideas
A Flood of Ideas
Flood control: scale and warning
Summary
We developed a software idea that would be able to cross-reference different data that was given by NASA satellites to predict a flood and estimate the damage to the infrastructure.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Floods are one of the natural disasters with the greatest repercussions, both at an economic level (due to impacts on critical infrastructures), and at a social level with displacement or loss of housing, in addition to reducing or making it impossible to access services. Considering that in most cases the greatest damage occurs in places where it may be more difficult to rebuild (due to the economic situation), we believe that it is important to try to mitigate the greatest possible impact, to preserve human life in those places as well as the services that it entails, trying to reduce as much as possible the consequences after said events.
The proposed project is based on an innovative way of using the data provided by NASA satellites to create a classification system, this is important because with the most advanced information possible the receivers of the information provided could take actions before the consequences which would be serious or irreparables. The system can generate indicators with data that was crossed through a scale that we established.
Our proposal has a lot of potential in different areas, among them we list some:
ANIMAL AND PLANTS_ Thanks to the prediction the species could be safeguarded
on time in safe areas taking care of the biodiversity of all regions.
HISTORICAL AND / OR CULTURAL HERITAGE_ Protection of invaluable assets that are part of original collections and are part of the identity of each country.
AGRO-INDUSTRY_ Knowing this kind of thing can make decision-making when planning a plantation more intelligent, also early evacuations of livestock and seeds, among others.
DAMS_ These tend to overflow and even break, early warning allows different decisions to be made so that the impact is the least possible.
CITY AND COUNTRY_ The population living in rural areas may be isolated, having this prediction will allow early supplies and an orderly evacuation. In cities, for example, make smart decisions in construction optimizing resources.
RISK INDUSTRY_ Laboratories, oil companies among others, work with substances that can generate great contamination. This proposal allows us to rush to avoid the greatest possible damage.
These opportunities to reduce the risks and possible damages can only be encompassed under good coordination between NASA (who has the data) and the government, working together with other organizations.
How We Developed This Project
We chose this challenge because as a team we believe that we have the potential to address this type of problem thanks to our characteristic of being a multidisciplinary team. The floods caught our attention because it is a current problem in society of which few innovations are known so far and it is a great challenge for the team. Our focus has always been on creating a system that is intuitive, scalable, realistic and exploits the data that NASA already has.
To develop this project we use different design and programming tools, as for the design tools we use Illustrator, Corel Draw and Photoshop.
One of the problems we encountered was to establish which variables were related to each other, but we were able to solve it thanks to the good functioning of the team that made this instance fun and not stressful. This challenge was the first in which we participated online, although we had some connectivity problems we learned to work orderly and without losing the complicity that is generated in face-to-face instances.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
The software would use an interlacing, between the data provided by the programs JAXA GLOBAL RAINFALL WATCH and USDA - Foreign Agricultural Service Global Agricultural & Disaster Assessment System (floods in progress, damages caused with its statistical analysis, vegetation and nearby water bodies) and the data of the studied land (temperature, pressure, altitude) in order to process them to obtain a result of the scale we defined.
The scale that was designed is based on the creation of ranges in the different areas in which a flood affects such as hospitals, schools, industries, residences or services. Adding each of these aspects one digit to the scale.
In the current state in which the software is working, it is with a linear approximation of the input variables, which is not very exact, due to the lack of time for the generation of a function that is better coupled to the different variations. To create the constants used in this equation, a data collection was generated in the aforementioned websites, with a starting point in localities that are being affected by a flood as of today (date of the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2020) and the weather conditions that were manifesting there.
It was impossible for us to incorporate other variables that were intended (soil conditions in the affected area, presence of high wind currents, season of the year) because of complexities in how to integrate them.