Using Application Programming Interfaces to automate NO2 Data Collection of the Ukraine Region Using Data From NASA Satellites

Abstract

With a rapidly changing environment, tracking long-term changes is vital to understanding the world around us. Creating visualizations is one of the most effective ways to see the changes to the environment, which can be done by acquiring large sets of data. The focus of the research is on nitrogen dioxide(NO2) density in the Ukraine region. This particular region is a hotspot for special research as factors such as war can contribute to a very rapid change in the density of NO2 above the area. The negative impacts of high NO2 density, such as global warming and health issues, make tracking the density all the more important. In the current research, collecting the large amounts of data needed to create the visualizations can be a lengthy and tedious process, with daily data collection requiring multiple steps. The aim is to automate this process, and Application Programming Interfaces(API) are one of the best solutions. APIs can be used to download the data from NASA servers in one simple step. Using APIs, code written in Python is run, simplifying the task of the user to just changing the date range for the data needed to be collected. The use of APIs in data collection simplifies a task that originally took hours, into a task that can be completed in under 5 minutes.