Awards & Nominations

Carbon Road has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Local Peoples' Choice Winner
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?

Carbon Road

Summary

Carbon Road is a solution that provide the identification of places with high CO2 concentration, with the goal of reducing the climate change and be able to save lives. Using datas of the NASA satellites and of local maps, the developing app will be able to patch a safer way, with less pollution and also track strategic points to do CO2 capture, changing it into biomass, cosmetics and many other products. This project has the potential of helping people that have respiratory problems, by showing them how to avoid places with a lot of air pollution and warning them about the impact that this problem with CO2 has in the air of the cities.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed an app to prevent people from tripping over our carbon footprints. The app informs the best routes and locations that avoid areas with high concentration of carbon dioxide.


The app works by crossing data from NASA, CSA and SIRENE, transforming them into easy-to-interpret maps for diagnosis.


This information is especially important for people with respiratory problems, who will be able to avoid heavily polluted areas, thus avoiding the worsening of their health condition.


It will be possible to indicate which regions of the city are the properties located in areas with better air quality.


With this information in hand, city halls will be able to think of alternatives for CO2 capture and control in the most affected areas, such as the elaboration of urban projects and improvements in public transportation.


Our team also proposes an architectural solution, based on bioplastic and microalgae, which will be implemented in buildings and will capture Co2, while producing valuable biomass.


Therefore, through our diagnostic app, together with the solution involving microalgae, we hope to achieve a future where people have clean and safe air to survive.

How We Developed This Project

What inspires us is the opportunity to contribute with SDG 3, SDG 11 and SDG 13, providing a clean and safe air to survive. Our approach was to make data access and interpretation of carbon levels in the atmosphere possible and accessible. To develop this project we used the expo.io, the framework React Native and the program language TypeScript to develop the app. In the phase of development, we had some problems by trying to convert some datas of OCO-2 XCO2 Observations (NASA). The archives were in the .netCDF format and we had to pass to the .csv (or .json) to use it. Because of that, we couldn’t apply it on the deck.gl and be able to integrate the interactive map, with datas of the concentration levels of CO2, on the app.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We use specially carbon emission space data. Our goal is to identify mainly the CO2 levels over roads, streets, avenues. We did it by using the OCO-2 XCO2 Observations (NASA), that help us to identify places with a high CO2 content when applied to kepler.gl (is a powerful open source geospatial analysis tool for large-scale data sets) and can be integrated into the application using the deck. gl (is a WebGL-powered framework for visual exploratory data analysis of large datasets.)

Data & Resources
  • OCO-2 XCO2 Observations (NASA)
  • MOPITT (CSA)
  • National Emissions Registry System(Sirene)
  • React Native
  • TypeScript
  • Expo.io
Tags
#airquality, #datascience, #mobile, #CO2, #carbonfootprint
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.