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visualizations of the world in 4D, such as satellite tracking and seismic history. The NASA World Wind 2017 Intern team has designed an educational web app that visualizes the effects of climate change on agriculture using a large collection of global agriculture and weather station data and the Web World Wind Software Development Kit (SDK).
The World Wind intern team utilized technologies including HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to develop the application, incorporating and analyzing spatial data for agriculture and atmosphere. Data in various file formats are organized, analyzed and visualized on the globe. Users can click on the respective weather and nation placemarks for statistical information. This includes details specific to that country’s history for atmosphere and agriculture and for a specified timeframe. Users can also control each dataset on the globe by adjusting opacity, time and other options for comparing crop production versus climate. This web app is intended for use in classrooms by teachers and students, as well as citizens of the world. Children and adults alike will be able to learn about climate issues by visually experiencing the data according to their interests. Users will learn about the effects of weather over time on agriculture, the impact to national economies and much more.
Screenshot showing the available data for a selected country, which includes lists of crops, price, livestocks, and agricultural emission.
Screenshot comparing historical agricultural and weather data on a plot for USA.
Screenshot showing AgroSphere comparing potato data from around the world.
- Dynamically visualize various types of data, such as rainfall, crop production and prices.
- Graph agricultural data from 1961-2014 and atmospheric data from 1989-2014 and view both simultaneously.
- Adjust time and opacity of layers displayed on the globe and thereby integrate layers to study groups of information together.
- National agricultural output can be examined closely and also compared to one another.
- Search for current weather data for any city around the globe.
- Load in any number of spatiotemporal geographically accurate data from multiple sources, using data formats such as GeoJSON, WMS, and CSV.
- Use the location Search Tool in the View Options tab to immediately visit any desired location.
- The app and most of its functionalities are available on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets).
We discussed our web app and work-in-progress with Martin C. Heller from the Center for Sustainable Systems at University of Michigan. He offered us critiques from a researcher's point of view. We also tested our app on NASA interns from the STEM Teacher and Researcher (STAR) program to receive suggestions from an educational perspective. Finally, we showcased our app to professional web app developers from institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania.
- Visit http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/AgroSphere to use the app on your webpage.
- Download or clone the repository in to local storage and run the index.html in a webserver using WebStorm, which has a built in webserver (https://blog.jetbrains.com/webstorm/2013/03/built-in-server-in-webstorm-6/), or by using MAMP (https://www.mamp.info/en/), a free, local server environment).
You are welcome to add more climate and agriculture data using our built-in CSV reading functionality and the WebWorldWind Placemarks feature. For example, drought and flood data can be added and displayed on our app to examine how agriculture has been affected by those particular disasters.
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center
Manager: Patrick Hogan
Authors: John Nguyen, Mingda Tang, Stacey Chen, Atreya Iyer, Nick Rubel