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.
Considering that humans are social beings by nature, the pandemic related social distancing restrictions have been taking a toll on the mental health of many around the world. Among those in quarantine, radio amateurs across the world, have been turning to their hobby in an attempt to reach out and keep connected.During the pandemic, there have been reports that lockdowns have brought an increase in the number of radio amateurs, as well as an increase in the contacts between them. We aim to illustrate whether throughout times of social distress a communication related activity such as Amateur Radio can benefit people by keeping them feel connected and socially active!
This project will attempt to provide proof of a correlation between the COVID-19 restrictions in mobility and other indicators related to the pandemic with real life statistics depicting the activity of radio amateurs across the world. Such activities may include the number and frequency of radio contacts as well as other aspects of the hobby where such historical data may exist. Radio amateur activities can be easily geolocated because the amateur radio station callsigns include relevant country/location specific data in their prefixes.
Amateur Radio is a hobby and volunteer service used by millions around the world. Licensed amateur radio operators use a unique callsign, allocated by national licensing authorities, to identify themselves and talk to other radio amateurs on the air.
Online amateur radio activity databases are already being kept up to date and their data goes back several years. By combining these data sources with data from the EO Dashboard and from the Euro Data Cube sources, we aim to support, through the use of charts, the idea that activity shifts in communications closely follow social mobility restrictions and in general periods of environmental, social or geopolitical distress.
Amateur radio is a multi-disciplinary hobby that has been involved in space related activities, technologies and exploration since the 1960s. The involvement of the Cyprus Amateur Radio Society with such activities has exponentially grown over the past few years and now includes the systematic downloading of imagery and telemetry data from various satellites. Through these activities, the EO Dashboard and 2021 hackathon has been brought to our attention and the possibility of amateur radio databases being used as another “indicator” source started to take shape.
Our approach into developing this project was to utilise our access to online database sources of the amateur radio community such as ClubLog (a free web-based logging tool) in order to draw historical time series data regarding radio amateur activity around the lockdown periods. The data were obtained in the form of CSV files and with the help of the EDC JupyterLab, freely provided to the EO Dashboard Hackathon teams, it was parsed, conditioned and visualised in the form of charts within a Jupyter Noteboook. The data was then correlated with other sources discovered on EO Dashboard such as the Google Mobility Data and Oxford University’s coronavirus government response tracker data. Our challenge was to condition the data into a suitable data series that could be merged within the same table as the amateur radio activity data and thus be plotted on the same chart for comparison purposes.
Once it was established that the amateur radio activity data per country had a strong correlation to the lockdown periods for that specific country, we proceeded to further support our argument that in periods of reduced mobility the radio amateur community displays a significant increase in the frequency and number of radio contacts. To do this we used an indicator from space! In particular, by using the EO Dashboard we have discovered a relation between the measured air quality data (concentrations of NO2), obtained through both ESA TROPOMI and NASA OMI projects, for major metropolitan areas around the planet and the increase in the number of amateur radio contacts.
Our conclusion was that reduced NO2 emissions around a geographical area usually indicate reduced mobility which in turn shows up as a peak in the amateur radio activity chart.
We strongly believe that the "ClubLog" data can be used as a first-class indicator within the EO Dashboard and that it can be easily integrated in a similar manner as to the Google Mobility Data. Clicking on a country map could display the Amateur Radio Activity for the selected country and could potentially be used by Data Scientists to correlate and cross-verify communication activity shifts with future events that have an impact on social mobility. In particular it is well known that Amateur Radio activity rises significantly around areas and times of natural disasters.
The directory containing the Jupyter Notebook for our solution was submitted through the EDC JupyterLab for EO Dashboard Hackathon 2021. Furthermore, all the relevant files including the Notebook, PDF rendering, Project Demo Presentation can be found here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fGzQDeH9zWIO5do0TCLcZ450FKjwVIal?usp=sharing
Our special thanks goes out to fellow radio amateurs and ClubLog database maintainers, especially Michael, G7VJR and Marios, 5B4WN for their help and support with provisioning the required data.
#Amateur Radio, #Social Impact, #Social Distancing, #Mental Health, #Isolation, #Quarantine, #cyhams, #Cyprus Amateur Radio Society, #ClubLog
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.