Hacking Copernicus marine data at EUMETSAT
More than 40 keen hackers attended EUMETSAT’s first hackathon over the weekend of 9-11 June.
Working with Copernicus marine data, the local DataVizRm group hackers split into seven teams to tackle one of three ocean data challenges: make it useful, beautiful/educational, and open.
01 November 2023
22 June 2017
The aim of the event was to raise awareness of all the free and open Copernicus marine data from CMEMS and EUMETSAT, and to help new users work with the data.
After working all weekend, the hackers presented their projects on the Sunday afternoon and judges from EUMETSAT (Mark Higgins and Guillaume Aubert) and Plymouth Marine Laboratory (Hayley Evers-King) chose the winners.
Ship routes, message in a bottle and working with CODA
An innovative ship route optimisation tool won first prize for Juan Fernando Vizcaya Garcia, Mario Castro de Lera and Pablo Ruiz Sanchez. They used CMEMS current and wave data to help optimise ship routing to reduce fuel costs and then visualised the best routes on Google Earth.
Second prize was won by Very Slow Mail, a project allowing people to send virtual messages in a bottle over the oceans and using CMEMS ocean current data to predict where they would end up.
And third prize went to a project which used Python scripting to develop a way to automatically download Sentinel-3 data for a specific area of interest via EUMETSAT’s Copernicus Online Data Archive (CODA) Note: CODA ceased operations on 27 September 2022).
Other projects included a learning platform to help people understand more about weather and ocean monitoring satellites, a project to visualise data from ARGO floats and many more ideas on accessing data via CODA.
As well as coming up with some brilliant ideas for ways to use the Copernicus marine data, the participants also provided some really useful feedback on how to make it easier for non-specialists to work with Earth observation data in the future.
