Awards & Nominations

Astronaut First Voyage has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Your challenge is to identify local sources of carbon emissions and/or estimate amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities to aid scientists in mapping carbon sources and sinks. How can you inform decisions to adapt to the consequences of a changing world and aid policy makers in making plans for the future?

IoT of Green House Gases

Summary

With the cell phone camera and an image analysis application, it is possible to collect data for each wavelength and radiation intensity observed. Each greenhouse gas has bands of radiation absorption at different wavelengths, so that an application can transform each cell phone into an analyzer of gases present in the atmosphere. Joining the data from the RT-Retrieval Framework (NASA-NTR49044), the data collected by the image analysis algorithm for gas detection and the GOOGLE MAPS API (with Cluster Maker) it is possible to obtain real-time data on gas concentrations in a high density mesh to triangulate the information and locate the sources!

How We Addressed This Challenge

The factors that have most influenced climate change in recent years are related to human activities. The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil increased the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere as well as industrial activities and deforestation for agriculture (NASA, [20--]).


 The main greenhouse gases emitted by human activities in 2018 in the United States were 81% carbon dioxide (CO2), 10% Methane (CH4), 7% Nitrogen Oxide (N2O) and 3% fluorinated gases, totalizing 6,677 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. In the same year 28% of gases emitted came from transport, 27% from electricity, 22% from industry, 12% from commerce and homes and 10% from agriculture (EPA, 2018). The emission of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel (ffco2) was 10,008 in 2018. In Brazil, with a population of 209,469,323, in the same year, the flaring of gas was 3.2 MtCO2 (CENTER FOR GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH, 2019; GLOBAL CARBON ATLAS, 2018).




Another difficulty is the frequency in which the data are made available, usually in the range of months.


A solution to collect high density and accurate data of atmospheric composition, in real time, to process data and make a clustering mapping accessible by public. The next picture shows a spectrum in UV-VIS and NIR regions made by a simple camera.



Gases absorbs radiations in certain paterns like show in the next picture:


In this way, the application can collect atmospheric composition data wherever there is a user, send it for processing on a server and with the processed data present a detailed map of the atmospheric composition that even allows the crossing of data in the form of clustering for the identification of major sources of gaseous pollutants.


This technology is important because it allows for real-time monitoring, warning of unhealthy gas concentration conditions, identification of punctual gas sources and planning of public policies on gas emissions. As the data can have high density, it will be possible to identify local differences caused by small activities, as well as the emission of gases in unlicensed activities.


It is expected to achieve a refinement of atmospheric composition data at a global level, which will help to monitor in the short, medium and long term the impacts of anthropogenic and natural activities.


A gamification method linked to physical exercise APPs will be used to show air quality during activity monitoring. Filters for Instagram showing the concentration of gases where people take selfies can be made available to encourage the use of the resource and increase its user base. All this can be made by a API availability.

How We Developed This Project

The region chosen to make the map used in the example video is the same region where the first hurricane recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Catarina, occurred. We have been experiencing extreme climate changes in this region of the world and we believe that software of this type can help a lot in understanding the problem and in defining public policies to combat climate change. The image analysis code for determining the concentration of gases was made in Visual Basic and is part of an older project by one of the authors of this work. A data analysis for a cluster will be done using Python 3 data analysis libraries like sklearn, mathplot, and numpy. The assembly of the interpreted and grouped data map will be done using the GOOGLE MAPS API cluster maker.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

The RT-Retrieval Framework (NASA-NTR49044) will be used to include data in locations where there will be no APP users and to calibrate the data generated by the users' networks.

Project Demo

https://youtu.be/b93Q-ebnruQ

https://youtu.be/aRMI4ahC_CQ

Data & Resources

1 - https://nasa.github.io/RtRetrievalFrameworkDoc/

2 - https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/marker-clustering#maps_marker_clustering-javascript

3 - https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gccourse/forcing/spectrum2.html#:~:text=Greenhouse%20Gas

%20Absorption%20Spectrum&text=Figure%204%20gives%20the%20amount,infrared%20radiation%20on%20the%20right.

4 - https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html#clustering

5 - https://matplotlib.org/

6 - https://numpy.org/

7 - Boden, T.A., Marland, G., and Andres, R.J. (2017). National CO2 Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, Cement Manufacture, and Gas Flaring: 1751-2014, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy 10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017.

8 - Center for Global Environmental Research. National Institute for Environmental Studies. ODIAC Fossil Fuel Emission Dataset. 2019. http://db.cger.nies.go.jp/dataset/ODIAC/DL_odiac2019.html 9 -Global Carbon Atlas. Brazil: gas flaring. 2018. http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/CO2-emissions/

10 - EPA. Greenhouse Gases. Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks. 2018. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks NASA. 11 - Global Climate Change. The cause of climate changes. [20--]. https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

Tags
#air quality, #environmental monitoring, #gree house gases, #IoT, #CO2
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.