Flow Finder

We are all affected by this man-made issue of pollution, and therefore we’ve created Flow Finder to track the location of lost waste and oil spills in the sea.

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Inspiration

A lot of the contamination that is put into the sea remains untracked. This is an issue for cleaning the ocean and warning vulnerable communities about potential water contamination. If we want to live in a more ocean clean world and safe world we have to track where the contamination is going to.

What it does

Flow Finder tracks any object you put into the east china sea region from its initial position to its final position after x days. It shows the exact path the object takes in the sea.

How we built it

We started with just a simple web app. The user inputs the coordinates and the date to begin the search., because the ocean current follows a seasonal pattern. The website has a database of plotted ocean current vector maps that shows ocean current velocity and direction at any given point. We translated that linear velocity into change in coordinates so that it can be displayed as a trail on a map. For the result image, we used matplotlib to plot a curve connecting all past locations of the object, showing a trail of said object on the website. Boostrap, Html5, Css3, python, flask, javascript.

Challenges we ran into

Initially we were going to connect our site to a Firebase Realtime database, and yet too many issues were prompted, so using online resources, we learnt a bit of flask and switched to that. The algorithm also ran into various bugs, but with time and patience, we were able to fix them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of: Making the algorithm to track the object was a very challenging and daunting task, but we achieved it as a team by reasoning out the logistics of the algorithm. The responsiveness and user interface is another accomplishment that we are very proud of.

What we learned

We learned how to make a responsive and friendly user interface, collaborate and divide our tasks on coding projects. We also learned how to use github and use Flask, Pandas library, along with a few other packages.

What's next for Flow Finder

We will process more databases of other seas to extend the tracking system beyond the East China sea region, so it is beneficial to users around the globe.

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