Data For Earth

Tag: renewable-energy

  • ClimaGrid, Our 2025 Code4Hope Project

    Last week, my team and I had the distinct pleasure of visiting the Microsoft building in New York as part of the finals for the code4hope hackathon! 

    I wanted to share what we accomplished through the event here (We got 2nd place!!!!), and I will link our presentation and github repository at the bottom. 

    First and foremost, the code4hope 2025 hackathon was a high school hackathon held over two rounds. For the first round, we had 3 days to develop our product and if we were selected as a finalist we would attend the final round in New York. As for prompts, we were all given a list of company briefs. Each brief detailed a fictional company facing a fictional yet plausible major problem. We were tasked with using programming to develop a creative and effective solution. 

    Here is the brief that we chose to base our product on: “GreenSpan builds futuristic cities designed to be net-zero and in harmony with nature. They integrate smart systems for water, energy, and waste, but scaling those systems while preserving livability is proving difficult. Their cities must adapt to both dense populations and changing climate patterns”.

    Our solution to the proposed problem of cities adapting sustainable systems to increasing populations and changing climate patterns is ClimaGrid, a grid-builder meant to help urban planners design more sustainable cities. 

    In the ClimaGrid interface, users are able to design a city using various custom metrics. They can pick a grid size and then fill each tile with one of four colors. Blue represents water, green represents green space, light gray represents low-population housing (such as suburbs), and dark gray represents more urban, highly-populated areas. It also takes in coordinates (latitude, longitude) of the proposed city as well as a year for projections. 

    Above is a sample output of our code. It returns heatmaps that show heat and waste distribution as well as an energy usage map that highlights areas where the most energy is demanded. There is also a projected aerial view which uses an image generation model although this was not always perfectly effective. 

    The heatmaps first take in a 2d array that represents each letter as a different value. The latitude, longitude, and year call an AWS API, which uses future climate models to estimate the temperature in that given year at peak stress (the hottest time of the year). Once this temperature is fetched, it is scaled across the heatmap depending on the type of surface that each grid square is. Cellular automata are used to disperse the heat to model real life heat-island effects. Temperature is trapped more easily in urban areas in the absence of water or green space. The pollution and energy heatmaps operate in much the same way. The projected aerial view was trained on thousands of overhead satellite images and is given the grid and told to generate noise. Given more time, this aerial view model could have been perfected.

    This is a very brief overview of our project, and you are more than welcome to check out the additional resources below which include our demo video, slideshow presentation, demo website, and complete github repo.

    ClimaGrid Code4HopeDownload

    Link to GitHub:

    Link to Demo Website (Only the frontend works as we had to host the backend locally): ClimaGrid

    https://github.com/JhonJhonDev/ClimaGrid

  • Big, Big Data

    In the past few years, data science has become more and more of a prominent topic in today’s society. It is ultimately what the foundation of this blog is built upon. However, people sometimes forget just what data is and what it could be. 

    The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines data as “information in digital form that can be transmitted or processed”. It is, of course, not a very broad definition but an accurate one nonetheless. 

    This then begs the question, what do we define as information? 

    Well, the answers are almost endless. Information and thus data can be crafted from almost anything you can imagine. Look around your room or wherever else you are and you’ll see just how much data you can find. The shape and dimensions of your room that make up the floor plan are data, the hexadecimal colors of your walls are data, the temperature, amount of clothes, number of books, and even how long your light has been on are all data.

    Because of the limitless possibilities of what we can define data as, there are almost limitless opportunities of what can be done with it. As a result, data science is used not only everywhere, but also for essentially anything. Being able to extract data from a process, a phenomenon, or a company shows us patterns and their subsequent implications on how to maximize efficiency. These days, anyone can use data for virtually anything. For example, corporate enterprises use data to advise investments and realtors use data to help set prices to sell a home. In this way, the possibilities for data science are endless and left up to the human imagination.

  • What Can You Do To Help Decarbonize?

    To most people, it is evident that global warming is a clear problem that negatively impacts the climate, the human population, and our surrounding ecosystems. In my city of Jersey City, we witnessed all of these impacts firsthand. Asthma and heat stroke occurrence rates as a direct result of rising temperatures and air pollution were among the highest in the state. We also experienced one of the hottest summers on record, with the heat damaging infrastructure such as subway lines (something which I experienced firsthand). In addition to urban impacts, our emissions also damage the forests, the very things that protect us most against climate change. Forest fires aren’t particularly common in New Jersey, but they have begun to occur much more frequently due to an overall dryer and hotter summer which extended into the fall. Last year, we also experienced the impacts of the Canadian wildfires, with the sky turning orange for days.

    While it is easy to understand that our carbon footprint and emissions must decrease, it is much more obscure understanding how. We need to work together as individuals, communities, and larger organizations to do what we can to limit the expected damage of our emissions, and hopefully work towards reversing them too. New Jersey certainly has targets that quantify what and how much we need to change, such as having 85% of new car sales be electric within the next 5 years. However, without large-scale support from both the top and bottom, it is much more difficult to accomplish. While some people have a greater capacity to help, whether that be through political influence or simply having access to more resources, it is a collective desire to improve that will ultimately be the driving force for success.

    With that in mind, what can you do? Well, it highly depends on where you live and what you have access to. It’s not easy to say “buy an electric vehicle” because in the current economy this is often not possible. However, there is something that virtually everyone can do.

    1. Use Public Transportation (Urban)
      1. Most cities have urban transportation infrastructure, though it may not be good enough. Regardless, commuting via public transportation is significantly healthier for the environment and on a large scale this would heavily drop our transportation emissions.
    2. Green Spaces (All)
      1. Our greenery is not only a beautiful way to contrast from the concrete jungles that are most urban areas, but they also go a long way towards mitigating our climate impacts. Trees and other plants provide regulating services that strip excess carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and also improve the overall air quality.
    3. Energy-Efficient Buildings
      1. Although this is very difficult on smaller scales, larger urban buildings that shift to clean energy such as solar panels or promote more conservative use of energy such as through better insulation can greatly reduce the commercial and residential pollution created.
    4. Sustainable Farming (Suburbs and Rural)
      1. Ultimately, the soil is our best friend in the battle against climate change, and it has the greatest potential for sequestration. Practices that maintain its richness whilst still allowing for profit in agriculture are among the best ways to mitigate climate impact. For example, planting cover crops during off-seasons would not only decrease erosion, but help funnel emissions from the air back into the groun
    5. Composting (Suburbs)
      1. One of the sources of our emissions is landfill waste caused by methane emissions. Sustainably disposing of waste food and crops allows us to not only prevent these methane emissions, but enrich our soil and its capability to sequester more carbon.

    These strategies can help residents contribute to a greener future no matter what their circumstances may be!