CHALLENGE

Tell Us a Climate Story!

Over the last several decades, a huge amount of climate data from numerous sources has been collected. This data is freely available to the public, but making sense of this vast amount of data is not easy! Your challenge is to use the open-source data on the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center website to tell a compelling story about climate change.

Background

Scientists, governments, academic institutions, and private companies have produced data on climate change for decades. The amount of data has increased steadily as climate research has advanced and the climate crisis has become more salient. For example, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2021 Working Group I report alone contains over 14,000 citations, demonstrating the large amount of published research. NASA is committed to the principles of open science, and the U.S. Greenhouse Gas (US GHG) Center aims to make climate data freely available and easy to use. However, having access to data and making sense of the data are two different issues. Science-based information is critical for making decisions on climate change action, but compelling narratives and stories are what motivate people to act. Developing well-crafted stories based on trusted scientific data is critical to ensure that we make the right decisions about climate change.

Objectives

Your challenge is to use data on the US GHG Center website to develop a compelling story about climate change. Can you develop a climate change narrative that is based on scientific data, and can be used to (a) educate a general audience, (b) motivate that audience to act, or (c) illustrate and explain a climate change phenomenon (such as warmer temperatures, rising sea levels, or melting ice sheets) or climate range-related phenomenon (such as increasingly intense tropical storms, heavier rainfall, worsening droughts, and more extreme wildfire)? Your story can include a combination of visualizations (made using the GHG Center’s visualization tools or software of your choice) and explanatory text. Think about how you can effectively present the story to a general audience. Will you use a dashboard, develop an application or program, or employ some other format? Get creative! Your story can pertain to a specific country, region, or multiple geographic areas, depending on the data you select and the narrative you choose. You can use one or more of the 13 datasets currently available on the GHG Center’s website to inform your story. In addition to using the Center’s datasets you can also use open-source data from other sources, but remember to focus your story on the data from the GHG Center.

Potential Considerations

You may (but are not required to) consider the following:

• Your story can take many forms. For instance, you could:
  • Use an interactive developer platform, like Jupyter Notebook or similar applications, to produce graphics and images from GHG Center data.
  • Produce a dashboard where users can select a region, type of greenhouse gas, and related variables and see a summary of climate change in the selected area.
  • Produce user-friendly visualization tools. Specific examples include:
    • Design a user-friendly Python library around the GHG-Center TiTiler Application Programming Interface (API) to make it easier to draw plots with GHG-Center data.
    • Build your own data explorer out of GHG-Center data using the TiTiler API as well as the Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) API.
    • Leverage the TiTiler and GIBS APIs to build a website/web-based story that describes different ways NASA measures and models GHGs and/or the carbon cycle.
  • Compare GHG data with socioeconomic data and use that comparison to tell a story.
• Datasets
  • The US GHG Center currently contains 13 federal datasets. Most of the datasets contain GHG data, but one contains population density data. You might find the population density dataset useful, if it is used in conjunction with at least one other dataset containing GHG data.
  • GHG Center datasets are from several different federal agencies. You can use as many of these datasets as you like to inform your story, but if you want to be eligible for global judging, don’t forget to use at least one NASA dataset.
• Definitions (adapted from NASA and IPCC)
  • Greenhouse gasses (GHGs): gasses in the atmosphere that trap heat from the Sun.
  • Fossil fuel: Any hydrocarbon (chemical containing only carbon and hydrogen) deposit that can be burned for heat or power, such as petroleum, coal, and natural gas.
  • Carbon dioxide (CO₂): A naturally occurring gas, CO₂ is also a byproduct of burning fossil fuels (such as oil, gas, and coal), of burning biomass, of land-use changes (LUCs) and of industrial processes (e.g., cement production). It is the main gas contributing to climate change.
  • Methane (CH₄): A greenhouse gas that is the major component of natural gas and is associated with all hydrocarbon fuels. Significant human-caused methane emissions also occur as a result of some agriculture activities. Methane is also produced naturally where organic matter decays under anaerobic (without oxygen) conditions, such as in wetlands.
  • GHG source: Something that releases a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. For example, the burning of fossil fuels is a source of GHG emissions.
  • GHG sink: Something that removes a greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. For example, plants—through photosynthesis—transform carbon dioxide in the air into organic matter, which either stays in the plants or is stored in the soils. Thus, plants are a sink for carbon dioxide.
  • Carbon budget:
    • Global carbon budget: the assessment of global carbon sources and sinks, and the resulting change in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
    • Total carbon budget: the maximum amount of net global human-caused CO2 emissions that would result in limiting global warming to a given level.
  • Top-down estimates: source and sink estimates derived from atmospheric observations.
  • Bottom-up estimates: source and sink estimates derived from land and ocean models or activity data.
  • Lateral fluxes: the flow of carbon between different types of sources and sinks (e.g., lateral flow of agricultural products from growth to consumption, riverine transport of soil carbon from land to ocean systems).