Climate Resilience Data Idea Generation Challenge - All Federal Data Sources

Welcome to the Climate Resilience Data Idea Generation Challenge - All Federal Data Sources!

With growing climate risk, it is evermore necessary to grow innovative capacity for resilience and adaptation. Using open climate data, imagine the possibilities of new applications that could fuel climate resilience efforts for communities and ecosystems as well as empower people to make smart decisions for the future. NASA and USGS invite you to take a step toward resilience by imagining solutions to our planet’s complex climate risks.

Round 1

For Round 1, you are expected to submit your completed idea, including:
1. Abstract Paragraph
2. The “Why”
3. User Stories
4. Future enhancements/extensions for this application
5. Screenshots or Mockups

Round 2

For Round 2, you are expected to submit your completed idea again. At this point, you may have made changes to your idea, based on any feedback from the client (if applicable).

Project Background:
For an overview, check out the YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUdTEXRZCg#t=148

Climate change has impacts on a global scale that are felt in our local communities. Whether it is coastal flooding that threatens lives and property, increased disruptions to agriculture, or ocean acidification hurting ecosystems, the risks have an impact on virtually every facet of our daily lives.

Historically, agencies like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  (NOAA), National Aeronautics and Space Agency  (NASA) and United States Geological Survey (USGS) have focused on developing world-class science data to support scientific research. With the rapid growth in the innovation community and the advent of big data, there are opportunities to encourage the wider community to apply novel thought and methods to unlock the potential of the data to address critical climate vulnerabilities.

The National Climate Assessment produced by more than 300 experts across government and academia has already identified the current and future climate vulnerabilities. We need tools that utilize big data to help our local communities improve climate resilience, save our ecosystems, and prepare for climate change. We have climate data that is free and accessible, but much of it is not available through web services.

That’s where you come in.

This ideation challenge is designed to understand what data infrastructure you need and how you would use that infrastructure to create impactful products. What would you do if you didn’t need to download code or data from NASA or USGS, but simply invoked functions over the web instead?  What kind of applications would that unlock? Which data sources would you use?

Recognizing the diversity of data across the United States Government and across the globe, the challenge is organized into three categories based on utilization of data sources:
- NASA. Entries in this class include only NASA data sources. Example: NASA GIBS API,  NASA LANCE, etc.
- U.S. Federal Government data. Entries may include
-- a single federal government dataset (e.g. USGS, NOAA, etc) excluding NASA data, or
-- a combination of two or more federal datasets including NASA data. containing any federal Example: USGS BISON  + NOAA NCDC storm events, USDA Cropland Data Layer + USGS Downscaled Climate Projections,  etc. For a list of suggested data sources, please refer to the Data Source section. You may include Federal data sources not listed in the sheet.
- Open. Entries are based on data that did not originate from the US Federal Government, which may include universities, nonprofit organizations, international organizations or governments, and other sources that have not been specifically outlined above.

Your ideas can shape the development of systems and services to make innovation easier for climate resilience.

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) produced by more than 300 experts across government and academia has already identified the current and future climate vulnerabilities. We need tools that utilize big data to help our local communities improve climate resilience, save our ecosystems, and prepare for climate change. We have climate data that is free and accessible, but much of it is not available through web services.

Data Sources:
Data sources can be found in this sheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1THpspYCkhxHIXhq9nOTfT-YLQnxvHLu_sxxBxRPXNB0/edit
Note: For this challenge you will need to include at least one federal data source. Agencies like USGS have several federal data sources listed, such as the National Gap Analysis Program, USGS Coastal and Marin Geology Program, the National Hydrography Dataset, as well as other USGS datasets that can be found through the metadata repository USGS Science Data Catalog.

Ideas should address at least one of the vulnerabilities identified in the NCA. High-level regional vulnerabilities have been highlighted in the table below. Additional detail on NCA findings can be found here: http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/downloads

Organizing Your Submission:
Your submission should contain a detailed description of your idea. Preferably one document, with four (4) sections:
1. Abstract Paragraph – Describe your app in this paragraph!

2. The “Why” – Describe how your concept addresses a particular problem as specified in the NCA, targets a given audience, and specifies which data would be used.
Below is a summary of the NCA findings. To learn more about each one, please see the reports here.

Region	Summary of findings
Coasts	Coastal lifelines, such as water supply infrastructure and evacuation routes, are increasingly vulnerable to higher sea levels and storm surges, inland flooding, and other climate-related changes.
Great Plains	Rising temperatures lead to increased demand for water and energy and impacts on agricultural practices.
Hawai‘i and Pacific Islands	Increasingly constrained freshwater supplies, coupled with increased temperatures, stress both people and ecosystems and decrease food and water security.
Midwest	Longer growing seasons and rising carbon dioxide levels increase yields of some crops, although these benefits have already been offset in some instances by occurrence of extreme events such as heat waves, droughts, and floods.
Northeast	Communities are affected by heat waves, more extreme precipitation events, and coastal flooding due to sea level rise and storm surge.
Northwest	Changes in the timing of streamflow related to earlier snowmelt reduce the supply of water in summer, causing far-reaching ecological and socioeconomic consequences.
Oceans	The oceans are currently absorbing about a quarter of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and over 90% of the heat associated with global warming, leading to ocean acidification and the alteration of marine ecosystems.
Southeast and Caribbean	Decreased water availability, exacerbated by population growth and land-use change,causes increased competition for water. There are increased risks associated with extreme events such as hurricanes.
Southwest	Drought and increased warming foster wildfires and increased competition for scarce water resources for people and ecosystems.
Northeast	Heat waves, coastal flooding, and river flooding will pose a growing challenge to the region’s environmental, social, and economic systems. This will increase the vulnerability of the region’s residents, especially its most disadvantaged populations.

3. User Stories – Write 2 or more user stories/use cases for this application.

4. Future enhancements/extensions for this application

5. Screenshots or Mockups

Although there are no limit to number of submissions you can upload, you should only upload multiple submissions if each one is comprehensive and substantially different from your others. Within these constraints, you are free to describe any number of alternative approaches and extra features. In fact, we encourage you to do so. You can't have too many ideas!

As a reminder you can submit anything you think highlights your idea clearly.

The sky's the limit! Good luck!

Target Audience
The target audience will be the general public. 

Judging Criteria
Judging will be conducted by a panel of NASA and USGS experts and will focus on three criteria
- Relevance to the NCA. Experts from around the world have identified key climate vulnerabilities. This application should target at least one climate problem.
- Clarity regarding specific data use. The application needs to be data driven. NASA and USGS want to know how specifically this data would be used to drive your idea. Extra consideration will be given to ideas that mashup multiple data sources to increase the utility of your application.
- Innovative edge. Think big, think differently. Tell us what makes this application the next big thing.

Submission & Source Files:
Preview Image
Create your preview image as one (1) 1024x1024 JPG or PNG file in RGB color mode at 72dpi and place a screenshot of your submission within it.
- You can take screenshot of your idea document and submit it.
- You can provide a blank image file and use it as preview image.

Submission Files
All original source files of the submitted ideas; it can be PDF, HTML, DOC, TXT or RTF file.

Source Files
All original source files of the submitted ideas; it can be PDF, HTML, DOC, TXT or RTF file.

Final Fixes
As part of the final fixes phase you may be asked to complete one round of minor changes to ensure your submission meets the stated requirements of this challenge.