The Obama Administration Turns to Google to Launch a Climate Information ...

As a part of the White House's efforts to equip American's with the ability to realize weather changes and global warming effects, the Obama administration has decided to launch a climate information website. This website will be unveiled today and give people a lot more information so that they can be prepared for climatic changes. They All kinds of climatic information and scientific data like predictable droughts and wildfires and even the rising sea-levels will be made available to people.

The idea was conceived by John D. Podesta and John P. Holdren. Podests is Mr. Obama's counselor who has been entrusted with the task of creating a game-plan to build political support for the president's climate change program. Holdren is a White House advisor on science and he's the one who came up with the idea.

There are several big cooperates who are a part of this initiative along with Google. They will even tap in to the federal databases to create the first topography of Earth to show how sea levels and other climate-related changes are occurring. Google will be donating one petabyte, which is around one billion megabytes, of cloud storage for this proposal.

The app at Climate.data.gov is said to be a powerhouse of information when it comes to climatic changes. Governments and even home and business owners will have access to it. One can simply type in an address to find out about the climatic changes that might possibly occur in the next couple of years to see if they or their properties will be affected by it. But as of now this is in the Beta testing phase unless they manage to map climate science along with the ease of locatability to the application.

For an average user there might not be much to explore as of now. Researchers along with private companies who create software simulators will be called upon by NASA and the NOAA to showcase the impact of climate changes. Rebecca Moore, engineering manager of Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach stated, 'We can help make sense out of vast amounts of data.' According to her the United States government accumulates and collates a vast amount of important satellite data. This is Google's endeavor to help people be more prepared for extreme climatic changes. They strive to make it as easy as using '...Google maps to get driving directions.'

The White House is even digging into the expertise and reach of more than a handful of U.S. companies, universities and private groups. They have even reached out to the World Bank for its Climate Data Initiative which is part of the president's climate change program.

So today, they will unravel a website that will contain and unravel hordes of information which has never before been released to the public. The Obama administration though, has been really careful and scanned through the data to avoid any security loopholes or terrorism risks. The released data on Climate.data.gov will have hundreds of thousands of bridges, roads, railroad tunnels, canals and river gauges in the U.S.

Related Posts