FoxCoding| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
Awards & Nominations
FoxCoding has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
FoxCarbon Monitor
Summary
FoxCarbon Monitor is a Web Page in which users can calculate their own carbon footprint, visualize the concentration of polluting gases in a specific area, and inform themselves about the health risk that such pollution index can cause in their community.Using EPA's information, the calculator can do its job efficiently and as accurately as possible. In addition, with Meteomatics' API, the Web Page is able to compute an image display of GHG concentrations with parameters inputted by the users (date, location and type of contamination). Data from various sites made possible to redact information about the health risks occasioned by the type of pollution analyzed with the Meteomatics' API.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We developed an interactive web page where users can visualize the concentration of polluting agents in their area and compute their carbon footprint by answering some key questions. The user can input their address, or just their zip code, and our code will determine its latitude and longitude coordinates thanks to our usage and linking of Google Maps API, which will later translate said location coordinates to the Meteomatics API, which will then display a map showing said contamination levels of a specified parameter to the user.
Conventional databases present complex user interfaces which result in a limited interaction and user-data engagement, our web page will thus aid in providing access to information with an easy-to-manipulate interface where users can obtain quantitative data about the environmental situation of a delimited area at any given time, in a more approachable and visual way.
We hope to raise awareness our carbon footprint and the importance of taking action, present information in an organized way to aid in the process of mapping carbon sources and sinks, and identify amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities.
How We Developed This Project
Our hometown Mexicali, a border city located in the north-west side of Mexico, is a growing industrial and major manufacturing hub with a population of more than 1 million people. Since 2013, Mexicali has been considered as one of Mexico's most polluted cities, due mainly to its geographical location, the constant use of chemicals for both agricultural and industrial purposes, and low-funding in the government agencies in charge of public services and regulations.
Hence, efforts to track pollution levels in the city have been underfunded, leaving large areas of the city without data on the levels of lung-damaging particles in the air. As members of the community of Mexicali, we are deeply concerned about this situation and the impact in both our future and that of future generations, which motivated us to choose this challenge and develop our project: FoxCarbon Monitor.
Our approach to developing this project began by identifying potential ways in which we could present an efficient way for people to 'visualize' the concentration of pollutants in their area, hoping to spread awareness about the effects of such.
FoxCarbon Monitor was built using web design languages like html, css and javascript which we complemented using back-front frameworks and APIs such as Meteomatics, which allowed us to manipulate information obtained from different satellites that could graphically show the contamination levels in the air.
Although it took us time to understand how to use it properly, it became one of our biggest allies when making a more user-friendly environment. Another one of our problems was that we wanted to make a carbon footprint calculator so that the users could understand the impact they have and after analyzing various calculators and resources, we came up with core questions which could potentially give us all the information needed to compute an accurate carbon footprint without bothering the users with a lot of questions. We like to believe that the most important of our achievements is the fact that the Web Page is as user friendly as it could possibly be.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We decided to use one of the offers available: Meteomatics API. After analyzing how we could use the API and the results it could supply to us we decided to, as means to make it easier to visualize the carbon footprint, use it to make a map around the user’s area and to show the pollution levels there. We also decided to use this API for graphing pollution levels in the area around a specific time and date, as inputted by the user.
Likewise, data that influenced our project was the carbon footprint calculator from the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which gave us the exact values with which we could obtain the amount of CO2 the user produced; this allowed us to formulate the questions needed so that our calculator could be as correct as possible.