Using satellite data to deliver Blue Sky

There are about 4987 satellites orbiting the planet, 1957 currently active, about 725 solely dedicated for earth observation and science. Just a single Copernicus mission at ESA delivers 16TB data/day. At the same time, these satellites are whizzing above our heads, our air is turning poisonous, water drying out, ground heating up and earth becoming unlivable.

A global nexus has started to establish on "climate change", "global warming", and "environmental crisis". These three “phrases” are like siblings, each with an individual personality that manifests uniquely to wreak havoc on the earth, yet each highly interrelated supporting and amplifying each other like any good kins.

Climate change is a broader change in earth's weather patterns driven by carbon emissions. It can mean anything from more rain to less ice or longer drought to a fertile arctic pole. It could (and would) mean greater resources and better living conditions for few, and end of life as we knew for very many rests of us.

Global warming is a long-term rise in average temperature across the earth over the past century due to incessant carbon emissions of the modern global industrial economy. Many parts of the world, including India, have seen a rise of 0.8 C average temperature in the past decade with an increased frequency of heatwaves and extremely hot days

The environmental crisis is the large umbrella of problems affecting certain regions and unleashing tremendous health and affiliated damages on local populations. Air pollution, water crisis, desertification, heat waves, plastic islands in the ocean are all members of the prestigious environmental crisis club that serves smog, haze, orange mercurified rivers, microplastic filled water, and barren lands among many other poisonous cocktails.

North India battles with 100 some days of Air Pollution and 100 some days of heat waves per year. Cities like Mangalore & Chennai are facing critical water crisis, often having to live without supply for 2-3 days at a time, and another 21 major cities in India are queued in line looking at zero groundwater levels by 2020. Bangalore, the city of lakes is grappling with chemical foams. Less-known parts of the country are dealing with mercury, arsenic, fluoride poisoning in their air, water, and soil and cancer in their bodies. I can really go on with the list of facts, projections, estimates, news, and incidents, depending on your appetite for depression. These environmental damages in-turn put pressure on local ecosystems and exacerbate the overall climate change and global warming troubles.

Being environmentalist is hard, especially in 2019 and more so in India. The amount of infallible optimism one has to muster to remotely think about potential solutions is infinite. Most founders worry about things like cash flow and capital, I find myself raising optimism to delay the motivational bankruptcy. Staring daily at the numbers we see, you will be immigrating to some part of the world that is not projected to sink or dry or heat up in coming years.

But, where there is will there is hope, and our hope is that solving for lack of data & information to all stakeholders in a highly accessible and layman-friendly manner will save the earth. For instance, have you ever googled any public equities' financial data?

If only we searched Delhi air quality or Ganga water quality or NTPC Singrauli emissions and got similar results. If we could access data about environmental indicators like what, where, when & how has changed over 20 years, it would stir up the world. If parents in Noida knew exactly how much PM on what day the NTPC power plant at Dadri spewed in the air to give Asthma to all their children, I bet they'd be pulling all strings to get that thing to shut up.

From this fundamental hypothesis started our idea to build say an "India Environmental Data Stack" that provides high-frequency/ high-resolution near-real-time data on all critical environmental indicators (like a mix of Aadhar + UPI) but for more stuff like air quality, water quality, pollution emissions, groundwater levels, heat waves, etc.

Sensors of all types for a variety of measurements are getting cheaper by the day. IoT investments in the new frenzies of the town. The same improvement in technology in sensors (all driven by smartphones and the unstoppable demand of my generation to click perfect pictures) has allowed for large improvements in sensors on satellites and quality & resolution of data. Then Elon Musk decided to build rocket ships that are capable of re-entering the atmosphere and landing back vertically, and all the costs broke loose. Satellites are now smaller (like nanosats), cheaper, equipped with better sensors, deployed via reusable (hence cheaper) rockets. On the other side of the coin, IoT device proliferation has started like the nuclear proliferation of the 1950s. Every other organization is putting some IoT device somewhere for some user.

We thought if we could combine these growing datasets of ground measurements and satellites, and glued them together with javascript & python, we could build a magic genie to give us better information about key resources of our planet like air, water, and land. With this hope and wish, we started Blue Sky Analytics. A tech startup to build a "geospatial data refinery" just like an oil refinery but to continuously process large volumes of satellite data (raw oil) with ample amount of ground measurement IoT data (like catalysts) to yield a series of final processed products.

At 3 am with 100 open chrome tabs on two MacBooks was born a new breed of tech-bro/sis environmentalists. In India, environmentalists are default bucketed into stereotypes of "socialist", "political", "activist", "NGO". People started to message us offering "pro-bono help to further the cause", and we were like "fluent in javascript/python?" oops sorry, bro. We are free-market, capitalist, tech-nerds trying to solve one big engineering problem.

We have 11 years to prevent irreversible damages and unless we start today, not only we'd be underprepared but also quite incapable to do anything. The time is now, the day today and our best tool is our collective brains. We wanted to plant a single thought in the current generation of tech millennials, who could probably already see their lives being endangered, that it is possible to solve these problems with data and technology freely available to us.

Netflix deploys an army of developers to fine-tune the movies we might like. Amazon has already built algorithms that know our consumerist desires better than ourselves. Much of our collective brains & computing space is allocated to selling more clothes. Wonder what miracles could shifting some human capital to environmental datasets might deliver.

So, for all ya visitors, supporters, and cheerleaders out there, we are a rag-tag team of developers and data scientists huddled in a not-so-hot basement in Gurgaon analyzing tonnes of crude data to build an intelligence platform to enable informed environmental decisions & action. Give us a shoutout for any collaboration or partnership opportunities. If you want to invest your monetary or human capital, we need lots of it. We are Blue Sky Analytics - leveraging satellite data with ground measurement data to save the environment.