The COVID-19 pandemic offered an unprecedented opportunity to look at changes in the Earth system in response to reduced human activity. Your challenge is to develop tools to better understand changes in the interconnected Earth system as seen through the EO Dashboard.
Throughout our reasearch of how the air quality, aqriculture, and water qualtiy is inter-related, we have found that COVID has impacted each of these variables. We provided a visual representation of these connections. We also provided specific data relating to these variables. Our main goal was to see the effects each of these had on the chlorophyll-a levels/water quality. Our team recognized that the annual season of summer and winter have a great impact on these variables, as well as the weather. With common interaction between air quality, agriculture, and water quality, they give a good sum to the overall chlorophyll-a levels in Los Angelas.
We developed a visual cycle representation of how COVID has effected air quality, aqricultural growth, and chlorophyll-a levels. This cycle becomes very important to understanding how COVID has effected us in multiple ways and it enables us to use this knowledge in the future. Our purpose in making this cycle was to show how quickly our way of living can affect our air quality and water quality. Each cycle (summer and winter) has slightly different variables for each. These include weather, temperature, and agriculture. During the summer months the temperature becomes hotter, as less people stay indoors, providing more people enjoy the sun. As a result of the better weather and increased outdoor life, the better the air quality becomes due to no constant heating system at their residence. The better air quality causes for the agricultural growth, which later leads to more sediment in the water. This sediment can cause for more chlorophyll-a in the water, which means poorer water quality. Winter being the opposite, causes more people to be indoors, more heating units, and less agriculture. This will later improve the water quality. We hope to achieve a better global understanding of how these cycles work and why we need to work harder at keeping our planet healthy.
We each enjoy learning about space, why not learn more about our home planet. This is an enjoyable way to learn more about topics we enjoy and some true events going on. We first looked at the EO dashboard to verify trends and patterns with our given variables. We thought it would be a good idea to give a visualize representation and provide a slideshow to further backup our research. We used pen and paper for our visualization along with google slides. We had some trouble finding data for chlorophyll-a levels in 2019, but made up for it by finding the NO2 levels in 2019 and 2020, as well as the plant NDVI.
We used data from the NASA OMI satellite to help find the NO2 levels, as well as the given NASA data for the chlorophyll-a levels. This information made for a strong base in our project/cycle.
We do not have the proper knowledge on coding to provide this step. If we had the knowledge, we would try to integrate a new indicator. This would be a pH level indicator for water quality. We noticed there was not a lot of information in the water quality section for Los Angeles. Our goal would be to expand this information with the pH indicator.
We used the EO dashboard to provide us with all of our data. This data was used to give examples of patterns and trends for our variables. This information gave a strong influence on our research and our overall project.
#Water Quality
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.