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Using earth observation data, inevitably many have to cope with the complex processing steps and the expensive computational demands to derive necessary information. The climate hazard toolbox is a set of geospatial tools providing users insights about global climate risk without the programming needs. The toolbox does this by predefining the data processing steps using data hosted in the clouds. Meanwhile, it preserves the flexibility for data analysts by enabling downloads of analysis-ready data layers, in both raster and tabular formats, which empower your statistical analysis. Climate Hazard Toolbox helps scholars integrate geo-intelligence into their analysis to help build more resilient communities and ecosystems. This toolbox started from the Poverty Reduction and Equity Group of the World Bank Group.
The following links provide more context around this toolbox and the challenges that it attempts to address:
Climate Hazard Toolbox is designated to do the following:
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Facilitate access to analysis-ready data layers derived from earth observation and big geospatial datasets
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Generate timely insights on climate risk (urban heat, air pollution, land use dynamics, etc.) without national boundaries
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Enable remote monitoring of climate hazards
Processing of satellite imagery has dozens of technicalities, each of which requires specific knowledge and know-how. If the users are not from the field, it risks the data being unused and isolated for knowledge generation.
To analyse the time series of vegetation changes from scratch using space-borne data, here is what you can expect:
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Write a script to download daily imagery for the last 10 years for a tile covering an area much larger than your area of interest
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Clip all imageries to your area of interest
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Clean all missing data such as defeat pixels
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Calculate vegetation proxy for each scene
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Summarize the pixels values for your single area of interest
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Visualize the time series using the data points
Even when all steps go smoothly, it will take you a long time and huge disc space, if not get stuck as the computational demands go beyond the capacity of your local machine.
Using Climate Hazard Toolbox you do not need to worry about searching for datasets from multiple web portals, nor do you need knowledge on different satellite sensors and geospatial libraries. You can download the data layer for what and where you want without the need for a powerful machine. Without programming needs, you can still gain the advantages of having highly granular datasets for your GIS analysis.
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Download analysis-ready raster layers for an individual admin level 2 region
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Download analysis results for each admin level 2 region in CSV format
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Explore analysis results with interactive maps and charts
The Climate Hazard Toolbox does this by:
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Predefining data processing workflow before user downloads
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Leveraging datasets hosted in the cloud by Google Earth Engine
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Providing a flexible GUI, such as a widget to define export resolution, which allows tuning from users