The Obama administration has announced this week a new initiative that will allow industries to use climate data in order to enhance long-range planning and decisions.
The administration hopes the Climate Data Initiative, announced today, March 19, will help people understand a number of climate risks in costal locations, according to the Associated Press.
The White House is working with Intel, Microsoft, and Google to create tools to make communities around the U.S. more aware of weather extremes, like flooding, drought, and heat waves.
White House advisers John Podesta and John Holdren said in a blog post that the administration wants to make easy-to-use tools for average people to prepare and be more resilient to the harms of climate changes.
"It is especially important for people, communities and firms to understand the features of their environment and their operations that create climate risk," said Climate scientist Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science, according to AP.
Climate data will be posted to a website for people to access as well. Click here to see the still in-progress site.
"These data sets have all been scrubbed carefully" to ensure their public release poses no terrorism threat," said Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology.
Google will create high-resolution drought mapping for the mainland U.S. as part of the effort.
"We can help make sense out of vast amounts of data," says Rebecca Moore, engineering manager of Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach, according to USA Today.
Moore added that the U.S. government collects a "tremendous amount" of valuable satellite data, but much of it is stored on tape and not released. She says Google aims to help people prepare for extreme heat, drought, sea level rise and flooding "as easily as they use Google maps to get driving directions,"
Microsoft will donate approximately 800 terabytes, or around one petabyte, of cloud storage to 40 climate-change research ventures, according to AP.
It will also customize its "Fetch Climate" tool, which works by accessing satellite and other data to show how a specific location has altered over time, for communities looking for help.
Intel will host three climate-change "hackathons" this year, in the Chesapeake Bay, New Orleans and San Jose. The events will challenge computer science and engineering students in each location to make useful new apps and tools by using current federal data, according to USA Today.
"We're acting as an organizer," said Stephen Harper, Intel's global director of environmental and energy policy, according to USA Today.
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