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.
Display of 3D particle clouds that show water quality in combination with other relevant data sources.
We developed the prototype of an application that displays water quality data and other factors in 3D particle clouds. For our prototype, we used chlorophyll-a data, the total suspended matter and the wind speed. By combining these sources, one might see how they are correlated (e.g. higher total suspended matter might correlate with more chlorophyll-a or lower wind speeds).
It gives a unique perspective on combined data sources.
Changes and influences of different factors, before and after the pandemic may become more obvious than in old display forms.
Moving "through" the 3D cloud, one gets an immersive impression from the data. For different points of time water data gets visualize in individual point clouds. The points show the factors in an intuitive visualization. Moving through the different point clouds, one gets an idea of the changes through time.
We wanted to develop a "proof of concept" prototype, showing the potential of new data display forms.
Since we are living in water-rich Hamburg (Germany), we are not only spatially close to the water but also feel emotionally connected to it. Water is an essential resource and it was fascinating to us, how much information one can get by using the Earth Observation Satellites.
We used the Unity Game Engine & C# to create the particle cloud and jupyter notebook & python to access and download satellite pictures with help from the EuroDataCube. The color codes and their distribution in percentage were extracted using the online tool: https://labs.tineye.com/color/ .
In future, downloading the data, extracting the values and assigning the variables of the particle cloud accordingly should be done by scripts. We are human-computer-interaction designers so communicating with the servers for data downloading and image processing were not our expertise. We also see the future possibility to integrate even more data sources, one could for example visualize the ship traffic in that area or look at the temperatures during the selected times.
Nevertheless, we are super happy with our prototype since we are sure it shows the immense potential new forms of displaying data can have.
The particles of the cloud are colored depending on the RGB values of chlorophyll satellite pictures ("water quality chlorophyll-a weekly anomaly" from the JAXA satellite). The color distribution in the picture was used to manually assign the colors of the particle cloud in the same ratio.
The size of the particles depends on the total suspended matter in the water (here we used data from all 3 space agencies by extracting the values from the Venice, TSM, Water Quality Time Series csv table). The movement of the particles shows the average wind speed on that day.
We tried to integrate the satellite data from all the different space agencies with additional resources. This way differences between the satellite data also become more apparent.
In this Video you can see the point clouds for 4 different time points in the bay of Venice. We looked at a time before COVID-19 (September 2019), one during the first lockdown (April 2020), one during a time with lesser restrictions (September 2020) and a more recent one (April 2021). So you can see how it can be used to analyse the effects of the pandemic.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhtZjBlhJvsZq4KWNA4FAb-W7cbc0KEp/view?usp=sharing
Looking at the points in the video, more blue/violet colors are equivalent to less chlorophyll-a, while green/yellow colors show a higher chlorophyll-a concentration.
The size of the points represent the total suspended matter (bigger points mean higher tsm percentages), in the video it can also be shown that we can compare the tsm data from the different space agencies (we can switch between the JAXA, NASA, ESA satellites) and the point size change accordingly.
Our solution could be integrated into the EOD the same way tables and graphs are displayed when clicking on an indicator and region.
Display option (increasing in complexity):
Recording of a particle cloud (with a drop down menu to choose a specific date) or
Interactive 3D model of several particle clouds in which you can "move" through time or
QR Code to scan and display in AR so you can move through the data by walking
#waterquality #water #datadisplay #3D
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.