Watching from above

Although the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is long associated with expanding dominion beyond earth, visiting far off galaxies or our first steps on the moon. Perhaps less well known is that NASA also "stays close to home" and in addition to keeping abreast of outer space, the program monitors natural events on earth. It is constantly adding to data, imagery and observation information of events across the globe which is then in turn made available for public use. This project leverages curated data from The Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker (EONET) program which is housed under the auspices of the NASA developer API program to map global events such as wildfires, volcanos and icebergs.

NASA APIs

There is all sorts of real time and historical information accessible through the NASA API portal appealing to a wide variety of interests. The site has makes it easy to sign up for access. Here's a link to the Developer Portal.

Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker

The image below displays just a few of the options available through the site. Choosing EONET from the NASA API offerings seemed to be a natural choice since as we are approaching the end of 2020 which by started out with fires in Australia and it appears to have been an an exceptionally tumultuous year in regards to natural disasters.

Fire and Ice

Of the 145 locations displayed here courtesy of NASA it seems like fires and iceberg breaks played a dominant role in the data collected through the EONET program with devastating results in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Clicking on the map will display a larger image.

The code

I used Python and Jupyter Notebook to retrieve, clean and map the data, and even though I consider it to be a relatively simple project, the thing that I consistently appreciate about the ability to transform and visualize data is the instant context it provides. What initially looked to be a raw set of latitude and longitude points which are meaningless on their own, transformed into a concrete realization of the deep impact forest fires and fissuring ice are having on planet earth.

The mapping was done using the Geopandas library because it integrates seamlessly with Python, therefore allowing instant access to evaluate the potential impact of the data. That being said, there is quite a bit more information that could be displayed, and it looks intereting! For example, NASA provides a link to additonal information for each event. So, it appears that the information would be best served in a more interactive format and I will do so in the near future.

Code available in the GitHub repository: Heaven Knows

Another NASA related project I did webscraping information about the planet Mars: Webscraping Mars