Tracking the Human Impact of Geomagnetic Storms

It is a web-based application that tracks geomagnetic storm activity and correlates it with crowdsourced human responses to investigate the relationship between space weather and human health.

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Inspiration

The idea came from my granny, who often complained about headaches and feeling off during geomagnetic storms. That got me wondering - could there actually be a connection between space weather and how people feel? This project is my way of exploring that question through technology and crowd participation.

What It Does It tracks real-time geomagnetic storm activity and invites visitors to answer a simple question: "Do you feel uneasy today?"

It collects anonymous user input and matches it with space weather data to help researchers (and the public) explore if there’s a real correlation between geomagnetic storms and human health effects like anxiety, fatigue, or headaches.

How We Built It We built it using Vibe coding by Bolt.new, a tool that made rapid development and deployment easy. It handles everything from frontend logic to backend processing, letting us focus on the idea and user flow.

Challenges We Ran Into API Access: Finding and integrating reliable geomagnetic data APIs like NOAA’s Kp index was trickier than expected.

Getting Initial Users: Encouraging people to share how they feel each day takes trust and awareness - we're still growing that.

Logging & Data Management: Handling user data anonymously while still allowing meaningful patterns to emerge was a major design challenge.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of We built a fully working app that collects real-world data and displays it interactively.

The app works live with space weather data.

We created something that could contribute to real science - while being simple and user-friendly.

What We Learned How to work with space weather APIs and integrate real-time environmental data.

The importance of UI/UX in collecting honest, repeated user input.

A lot about correlation vs. causation - and how careful we have to be interpreting human health data.

Add more detailed questions (sleep, focus, mood).

Create region-based data views to look at local storm effects.

Reach out to scientists and universities to analyze our growing dataset.

Develop a mobile version and add daily push notifications during strong geomagnetic activity.

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