The Earth is warming at an alarming rate, and the recent growth in CO2 emissions is a major reason for this change. Even though many local governments are trying to reduce CO2 emissions, the data they have to work with are often too general to provide a useful solution or effective policies.
The project sponsors are Geoffrey Roest, Postdoctoral researcher in SICCS (School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems) at NAU ( Northern Arizona University), and Kevin Gurney, Professor in SICCS at NAU. Professor Kevin Gurney has recent research on topics in carbon cycle science, climate science, and climate science policy. Also, he is working on the project involving simulation and quantification of US CO2 emissions, the linkages between terrestrial carbon exchange and climate variability, and the impacts of deforestation on climate. He also has worked extensively on climate policy and has been involved for over 25 years with the United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol.
For this project, they have collected large amounts of data about CO2 emissions in the United States, and they have been able to create a map over the country that displays this data.Our sponsor has done a great job at collecting a huge amount of CO2 data from cities across United States. However, these data are only available in technical formats and required specific softwares and tools to read them. Their goal is to make these resources available to general public.
The Problems
Our clients want more than just pictures and videos of the map; they want interactive graphics that help people visualize their city and their personal emissions in order to illustrate how their actions are affecting the environment in which they live. So, our goal is to build an easily accessible interface that allows everyday people to understand and explore CO2 emission findings.
Below, at a glance, are the problems plaguing our clients.
Data is only available in technical formats
Data is hard to interpret
No user interactions
Requirements
Most of the requirement are acquisition from the Project Description document. And we have meet with our clients few time to acquisition and replenish some requirements.
These requirements are based on our Software Requirements Specification document. You can view the various requirements at our Documents.
Functional Requirements
Our product will display CO2 Emissions data in the form of raster data
.
Our product will show data on map.
Our product will color the raster layer basic on the calculate of Max_Value
Our product will provide user interaction in map.
Our product will provide ranking.
Our product will allow user downloading the data.
Performance Requirements
The map shall be responsive and implement good design principles.
The map should have good usability.
The map should have good reliability.
The system shall verify data for correctness.
The system should be easily modified by non-members of our team.
Our product will allow different site access.
Environmental Requirements
Our solution must fit the design already on the client’s website.
Our solution must be able to properly function when put into the client’s website.
Our map should be integrating into client's website.
From these requirements, we have started work on a proposed solution to our client's problems.
Envisioned Solution
Our solution is to create a map displaying the CO2 emission in America. In the map, the different level of CO2 emission will be represented by different colors, and we will also provide a fair amount of user interactions to help the user get the information they want more easily.
This is one of our solution pictures
Our product will provide a United State map like above. Each small block in map will be fill in different color based on the CO2 emission level.
The map functions include:
Search location
Switch maps and layers
Zoom function
Display information for each state
The image shown above was based on raster data.
Technologies
Here are The technologies and services we choose for this project:
Mapbox GL JS: Good framework that can display map in forms and modals on the website.
Gdal: A collection of libraries that is used for reading and transforming raster data.
