NASA has zeroed in on four innovative concepts proposed by students and faculties of various institutes, regarding the ‘Innovative uses of climate projections and Earth-observing satellite data’. A follow up challenge asks participants to create an application or algorithm that communicates climate change impacts to the general public using the OpenNEX data, with awards of $50,000.
Principal scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, Ramakrishna Nemani spoke optimistically, “The ideas generated by this OpenNEX challenge demonstrate the value of these NASA data assets when put in the hands of citizen scientists. Our second challenge seeks to rapidly turn these ideas into practical applications.”
Open NASA Earth Exchange, or OpenNEX, is a cloud computing platform where users can share ‘modelling and analysis codes, scientific results, information and expertise to solve big data challenges in the Earth sciences’ such as the two that NASA has set up. The users have access to massive data sets, pertaining to global land surface images, vegetation conditions, climate observations and climate projections.
OpenNEX is available to the public on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud through a Space Act Agreement. Challenge developers will receive credits on the AWS platform for their applications.
A detailed story with the nuances of each of the proposals is available at this NASA press release.
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