Data for Climate Action: A Big Challenge for Big Ideas with Big Data

Posted by: Earth Networks

Data for Climate Action

It’s time for an honest conversation about climate change. The Data for Climate Action Challenge is rooted in this idea.

More and more, severe weather and rising sea levels impact life on Earth. In response, UN Global Pulse and Western Digital are currently inviting data scientists, researchers, statisticians, developers and coders and data analyst to apply for the Challenge. Using insights from nine leading companies in the big data space, winners will be able to make sense of the noise.

The challenge has a few different themes for applicants. The first theme is Climate Mitigation. This theme focuses on energy and transportation. The second theme is Climate Adaptation. This theme will focus on agriculture and food security as well as community resilience. The third and final theme is Climate & Other Sustainable Development Goals. This theme includes the focus areas of no poverty, good health & well-being and reduced inequalities.

The Data

The Data for Climate Action Challenge provides data from a number of leading companies from around the world. Data sets from these companies will allow participants to generate new solutions to combat climate change.

Nine leading companies are involved in this project. These comapnies give insights on social posts, satellite imagery  BBVA Data & Analytics is providing credit card data from Spanish countries. Another company, Nielson, is providing information on the sales of EnergyStar-certified and non-EnergyStar-certified products.

Our Data

One of the most important pieces of data for this project is weather data. The UN Global Pulse and Western Digital chose Earth Networks for this important responsibility. We will also be providing lightning data to from our Earth Networks Total Lightning Network (ENTLN) to researchers involved in the project.

We’ll provide lightning data from 2009/2010 to present. Both cloud-to-ground and in-cloud data will help researchers explore lightning locations and patterns. Historical data from the 1990’s on will be available depending on location. Researchers can access the world’s largest weather network with data from over 25 weather variables. After reviewing this data, researchers will be able to study weather patterns related to climate change.