Data Detective| Data Discovery for Earth Science
Awards & Nominations
Data Detective has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Data Discovery for Earth Science
Data Detective
Summary
Data Detective is a simple and free Google Chrome extension that can be used from any website with the purpose of allowing its users to have access to all possible Earth datasets regarding a specific type of natural phenomenon. With this extension, the user is able to have access to Earth datasets within seconds.
How We Addressed This Challenge
The Data Detective extension does the following:
- The user right-clicks on a set of words (i.e. "tropical storm") to look for tropical storm data in websites such as NASA Earth Observatory, NASA Worldview, etc.
- Once the words are highlighted, Data Detective appears on the context menu and directs the user to websites that have datasets related to the phenomena highlighted.
- Not only does it search for phenomena, but the user can highlight words that contain a location or date that he/she/they are interested in searching within the datasets of interest.
- Additionally, by clicking on the icon of the extension, the user has access to the pathfinders for aerosol, forest fire, and other atmospheric information. The user would have to right-click on a specific button within the extension to access a pathfinder of a specific subject.
By using the extension, users save the time they would utilize in searching for the variety of datasets and have those datasets accessible within seconds.
It is important to facilitate the search for data and information for researchers, students, and the general public. Additionally, making data accessible to these audiences allow them to create projects and studies for the betterment of science as a whole. We hope that this tool could be used outside of this hackathon and in universities and from people's homes. Additionally, we hope that this tool has paved the way for future hackathon participants and/or people interested in making Earth data more accessible.
How We Developed This Project
Because the team members working on this project are graduate students and have had to go through the experience of spending countless hours looking for atmospheric and oceanic data for their research projects, they felt the need to create a tool that would facilitate this process and make it accessible to everyone. Additionally, a tool with no login would facilitate access to these datasets. We made it by using JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and JSON to create background scripts, content scripts, and other logic files. Scripts created for the Data Detective Google Chrome extension were written in Atom text editor and are published as code in GitHub. We used YouTube tutorials to learn how to create an extension.
Some of the problems we had, other than having little time for all the details we wanted to add in this extension, were the following:
- We were new to coding prior to the start of this hackathon and sometimes that made it difficult to understand some of the problems we were running into with the code itself. However, we were able to solve some of the issues by doing our own research online.
- Because the hackathon was virtual and not in-person, working on the code between team members was a challenge. Thankfully, during the hackathon, we managed to work on the code in real-time with the Atom text editor.
- Originally, we wanted the Chrome Extension to serve as a search engine rather than a context menu. However, because of time restraints and because we were new to coding, we resorted to using the latter. Nonetheless, the result conveyed the main idea behind our project.
Regardless of these issues, we look forward in continuing to develop this extension for academic purposes, in addition to further expanding our knowledge of programming languages for the same reason.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We utilized space agency data from JAXA, CSA and NASA by linking pathfinders and their websites that contain Earth data to our extension. When the user utilizes our extension, the results automatically appear in websites under any of these space agencies.
Project Demo
https://cwistyrocks.wixsite.com/datadetective/data-detection-extension
Project Code
Data & Resources
DATA & RESOURCES
NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY
Natural Events Image of the Day
SCIENCE DATASETS (VIA EARTHDATA SEARCH)
NASA EARTH SCIENCE COMMON METADATA REPOSITORY (CMR)
Application Programming Interface (API) Documentation
NASA WORLDVIEW
DATASETS FOR DUST
DATASETS FOR FLOODS
ESDS DATA PATHFINDERS
Biological Diversity and Ecological Forecasting
Agriculture and Water Resources
JAXA RESOURCES EXCERPTED FROM HTTP://EARTH.JAXA.JP/EN/
Earth Data Collection by JAXA Satellites
JAXA satellite database related to land, Sea, Atmosphere, Snow and sea ice, Water cycle and Climate fields
JAXA Himawari Monitor (P-Tree)
JAXA GLOBAL RAINFALL WATCH (GSMaP)
CSA RESOURCES
MOPITT on NASA’s Terra satellite
From regional air pollution sources (fires, industry, vehicles, etc…), MOPITT carbon monoxide data is available for you to integrate into your solution!
SCISAT
This satellite measures more atmospheric gases than any other in the world. Its dataset contains multiple air pollutants (NO, NO2, SO2, CO, CH4, and CFCs) for you to use, including unique atmospheric profile data for each gas (concentration as a function of altitude). The dataset is ready for your team to study and link to human health, particularly over the Earth’s poles (Arctic and Antarctic). Enjoy!
OSIRIS
This dataset is used by Environment Canada to study nitrogen dioxide pollution throughout the atmosphere around the globe. When combined with other NO2 datasets, it can be used to measure NO2 profile concentrations that are closest to the Earth's surface, like nothing else.
Canadian Space Agency Open Data Portal
The Canadian Space Agency makes scientific data available to researchers, students, industry and the public. Come explore!
Government of Canada Open Data Portal
Government of Canada Open Maps Portal
ESA RESOURCES
Euro Data Cube is providing seamless access to global archives of Sentinel, Landsat and MODIS datasets, easy to analyze, integrate or run machine learning workflows on.
CODING RESOURCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBaw_6cPmAw&t=912s&ab_channel=WebDevSimplified
https://github.com/WebDevSimplified/Vanilla-JavaScript-Modal
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted
https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
https://medium.com/@ryanfarney/creating-a-chrome-extension-that-will-open-in-a-new-tab-bc06b7eb54aa