ReefWatch

Inspiration

Due to rising sea temperatures, climate change, pollution, and ocean acidification, roughly 50% of the world's coral reefs has been lost since the 1950s.

This crisis is accelerating at an alarming pace, beneath the ocean's surface. ReefWatch was created to make this crisis visible for anyone.

What it does

ReefWatch is a real-time 3D globe that maps coral bleaching from every monitorred coral reef in the world, using data from the NOAA Coral Reef Watch.

Each point on the globe is a coral reef, color coded by its bleaching stress level. Each stress level is calculated by its live sea temperature, bleaching threshold, and its Degree Heating Weeks.

Users can choose to switch between a station view and a heatmap to see the globe's coral bleaching at a glance.

How we built it

ReefWatch was built using:

globe.gl for the 3D Globe
Coral Watch API (api.coral.tsr.lol) for the live reef monitoring data
JS, HTML, and CSS ## Challenges we ran into
Working with the globe.gl API, which requiring a lot of debugging to get it rendered
Restrictions on the Coral Watch API which required us to proxy through allorgins.win

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A fully live 3D Globe that loads data from real-time monitoring systems for coral reefs
An easy-to-view crisis made for anyone to understand ## What we learned
How coral reef bleaching is measured and calculated over many different variables