The longer human activities are changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the more visible, wider, and longer lasting the scope of environmental impacts may be. Your challenge is to tell a visual story about the impacts of the pandemic using Earth observation data and other complementary information.
Since the start of 2020 till date, COVID-19 pandemic is all that we see, hear, talk and are trying to evolve through; the real-trouble all around the globe-but just, for our species! With general life seeming to be on halt for humans, lockdowns declared and curfews enforced, what does this mean for our Planet? As the UN Environment Program highlights the beneficial effects of global shutdown, almost diminished traffic on the Land, air, water as well as reduced demand for energy, the crisis has actually served a higher purpose. Providing our Mother Earth the “much-needed breathing space” to Recover and Thrive.Which is exactly where our story is headed - Finding beauty amongst the chaos.
Storytelling in the Covid-19 Era, basically intends to create a common understanding of how the virus has brought in a new order, the new Normal. It can be described as the two sides of a coin, without one the other cease to exist. Without our lives being affected the recovering of the planet has become impossible, which has to change. And the same being our motive ,is illustrated in our visual-story, through this challenge.
We believe that a good story can change how people look at the world and get to learn about things going on right under their noses that they never knew existed. We as a team want to inspire the common people in exploring the content being delivered ,To witness it, make sense of it and to participate in it.
As we journey through the story, we elaborate the immediate reduction in traffic of aircrafts, automobiles, containers, marine vessels and ships that led to noticeable improvements in our air, land, water, sound and light quality, simultaneously decreasing of all kinds of pollution originated by us. These reductions coincide with implementation of strict quarantine measures across Europe and worldwide.
As human behavior has changed during the pandemic, ongoing measurements from Earth observing instruments have detected concurrent changes in environmental factors, such as a drop in the air pollutant- nitrogen dioxide, oxides of sulphur ,carbon monoxide; decrease in water, thermal & radioactive pollutants like uranium, mercury, fluorides, zinc, lead, sediments, algae blooms ; and in light pollution due to fewer aerosol content in air. We also like to address that due to limited restrictions, partial or full lockdown, curtailment in many activities, many industries and company's have gone out of business directly damaging the supply chain management and indirectly common people in these sectors e.g. mobility, shipment, cargo, economic activity, construction and manufacturing, which has also dropped the global energy demand and consumption. Although, COVID-19 is viewed as an accelerator to the development in only one sector which is digitalization.
Despite that Covied-19 is spreading in whole the world and there are many measures that have been set from different countries to mitigate the coronavirus infection, a lot still remains to be done to educate people about the pandemic.
We get inspired to choose this challenge as it is different than the other challenges and fit with our energy, abilities, facilities, and more important with our goal. We knew that this challenge will push us to put more energy, give more effort to reach our goal. Also, because the education is the foundation stone of everything, we challenge ourselves to speak up, to demand more, and create the change that we want.
In this project we use, modified approach, we followed up that approach as we put enough structure and documentation to reduce the risks posed by distribution of our team, but enough collaboration and iteration to respond to any changes in a nimble way. Also, we included an overlap in phases so that there are key collaboration points in the team. Moreover, we analyzed every part that related to our challenge occasionally, and we used an early release with every phase and part and compare them, then incorporated everything together.
In this project we used different tools and software's. We used EO Dashboard, NASA, ESA, JAXA Websites, for insights and satellite images for air quality and also, Sentinel Hub- Eo Browser software for (sentinel-2) Bahrain's water quality satellite images, and Sentinel Hub- Eo Browser for Water quality visualization script for Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 imagery data, Beside other different websites resources.
For the problem aspects we did not have a lot of problems, our work went smoothly, as we was having clear goal and we organized everything and take it step by step to finish the project and aim our goal. The only problem we faced was the time as we was need to collect a lot of data and bring it out together in short time.
On the contrary side, we have many achievements, we were have a clear goals and we organized things by priorities, defined roles and responsibilities, and manage work and deadlines based on priorities.
Also, we practice continuous learning while we was communicate together, as we learned new things about our planet and how we use the EO Dashboard, also we create something advantageous.
Moreover, we learned the ability to negotiate, how to manage the risk and the time beside critical thinking. All these advantages we gain it while fighting against the time.
In this project we use NASA, ESA, JAXA space agencies to collect the data. We have collected so many information from these agencies for the Air, Ocean, Energy waste and Light pollution data that mentioned in our project. Then we connect it to different sectors such as economies, air, ground, ocean, such as air quality, greenhouse gases, Tropomi CO, airports, ports, cars and containers activities, slowdown and recovery proxy maps, water quality.
https://www.canva.com/design/DAEiwMBCMmQ/hNGWCUJ_byr6ArxL_aOqzQ/watch?utm_content=DAEiwMBCMmQ&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=sharebutton
The idea of storytelling in science is a perfectly reasonable way to approach to writing about scientific observations. Research is not all about charts and figures. Well-written research can be composed to create a captivating story. The words are impactful to the reader because they make the presented research more comprehensive.
By utilising information from these websites, we obtained valuable and beneficial data and combined it into an astonishing yet enthralling story.
https://eodashboard.org/
https://earthdata.nasa.gov/covid19/indicators/water-quality
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/21/pandemic-lockdowns-climate-environment/
https://www.planet.com/gallery
https://eodashboard.org/
https://earthdata.nasa.gov/covid19/indicators/water-quality
https://medium.com/sentinel-hub/water-quality-information-for-everyone-a81faab8ff5e
https://medium.com/sentinel-hub/race-upscaling-competition-results-8a339bb8c942
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/12/9/2638
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019?adgroupsurvey=%7Badgroupsurvey%7D&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_dWGBhDAARIsAMcYuJwa5bPnaJ-tXcDP2nWtnD2N0YM4wn0d9HfNztWfmj-XW4k8SJNG-mkaApf9EALw_wcB
https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/
https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-cargo-ships-stuck-california-long-beach-los-angeles-2021-4?op=1#-and-piers-9
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/cargo-ship-stuck-in-egypt-s-suez-canal-affects-shipping-worldwide/ar-BB1eWPRo
#air quality #story-telling #land pollution #sea pollution #air pollution
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.