A number of international agencies and academic institutions have developed a number of applications allowing users to monitor the effects of climate change on the planet. The following list includes tools and applications that record extreme weather events and/or temperature rise, and are used to forecast and manage natural disasters.
Measuring what people breathe in Athens over the last 10 months by using a portable sensor
Temporary improvement of air quality in Athens during the 1st lockdown.
A mobile application from NASA that displays real-time global satellite data of the planet’s vital signs. This 3D app is ideal for students, teachers or anyone interested in Earth science. It can be a great resource for carbon dioxide conditions, gravity anomalies, ozone levels over Antarctica and more. Download it to your Apple or Android device to monitor the Earth.
BEYOND satellite remote sensing unit
A service offered by the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) for forecasting, detecting, monitoring and managing extreme natural events and disasters.
A real-time fire monitoring service developed by the National Observatory of Athens built to detect and locate forest fires all over Greece by continuously surveying satellite imagery automatically updated every 5 minutes. FireHub is free to the Fire Service Operations Centre with full support from the BEYOND team.
METEO’s WRF-SFIRE fire spread forecast tool is a specialised system that draws on a dense network of 400 meteorological stations operating nationwide. The tool was developed at NOA by the METEO team.
EXTREMA Europe is the result of the collaboration between the National Observatory of Athens and the “Resilient Athens” programme of the City of Athens. The service provides users with a personalised heat stress risk based on their location in the city, safety advice, as well as directions to the nearest cooling centre on a map: https://extrema.space/. It is available to residents and visitors of the city. The service has already been adopted by Athens, Paris, Rotterdam, Mallorca, Milan and other European cities.
The project’s main objectives are to raise awareness on the vulnerability of Mediterranean agriculture to climate change and to support decision-making for adaptation planning. The project is being implemented in three of the largest islands of Mediterranean Europe: Crete (Greece), Sicily (Italy) and Cyprus.
This tool is designed to support informed decision-making in climate change adaptation planning. The user is guided through the different modules of the toolkit in order to gain insight into the expected impacts of climate change on the urban environment, to explore adaptation options, and to analyse the impact of adaptation interventions on enhancing climate change resilience.
In NASA’s latest educational game, Offset, the goal is to slow the pace of global warming. Players learn about the global carbon cycle, different carbon sources, and ways alternative energy and reforestation can help offset these sources. Take on the challenge if you think you have quick fingers and are a multitasker.
An independent scientific analysis that tracks global government climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement target “to limit global warming well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C”.
The application is the result of a collaboration between two organisations, Climate Analytics and the New Climate Institute. CAT has been providing this independent analysis to policymakers since 2009. The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) quantifies and evaluates climate change mitigation commitments and assesses whether countries are on track to meeting them. It then aggregates country action to the global level, identifying potential temperature increases during the 21st century using the MAGICC climate model.
NASA satellite images showing the past and present of specific locations.
With information from an article published in the newspaper “Efimerida ton Syntakton” «Climate change leaves no room for complacency»
