Product Review of Earth-Now
An app with support from NASA headquarters, created by the Earth Science Communications and Visualization Technology Applications and Development Teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This app creates a mental picture of global climate data such as temperature, ozone, and recent water vapor. It then codes the weaknesses or strengths by assigning colors to them. This information is then easily accessed by gestures across the device screen.
What Users Love About the App
“This app is awesome! When engaging with people about the dangers we face due to a lack of coverage by the media, I find it very useful as a visual to show people the current CO2 atmospheric data. NASA does incredible things on a shoestring budget! Earth now gives the public a direct link to our satellite’s most up-to-date data of Earth’s natural systems. Thanks, NASA. Keep up the hard work!”
“This delightful app comes from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the credible California-based science institution, CalTech. This app streams live data from a dozen orbiting satellites to give the curious-minded visual representations of temperature, water moisture, carbon dioxide, and more in partnership with NASA. It perfectly integrates with many NGSS standards from early elementary through secondary school.”
“This app is designed to display several data maps gathered via satellite. These data maps include everything from ozone, carbon dioxide, and monoxide to gravity field variations. Animated data maps can also be displayed, showing changes over time. These maps are rendered in false color tones projected onto a globe. The globe can be rotated but is locked at the poles; you can’t turn the whole geoid upside down. Zooming in and out via multi-touch is very rough, in direct contrast to the silky smooth scrolling iOS and Apple devices are known for. I hope this improves as the app is updated. Otherwise, the datasets load very quickly, and a details screen can be selected that describes the scale used for the map, the data’s importance, and the source of the data.”
“This is a well-designed app that will truly open our eyes to incoming data from these unique satellites, which, as a result, will give us a better understanding of our climate and how it evolves, especially with our industrial revolution! A big thanks to NASA JPL for their hard work, since it takes a tremendous amount of effort to actually “squeeze” and translate all this data for us to have a 24hour view of our atmosphere! God bless all those who made it possible!”
What Users Dislike About the App
“I am doing a project on climate change, and this gave me a better picture in my brain. It does need an update, though, because it blocked out Antarctica. I’d recommend you still try it; it’s really handy.”
“Improvements I hope to see are as follows. 1) Much smoother scrolling, the kind Apple is legendary for. 2) A higher-resolution globe; the current globe is passable but pixelated on the Retina Displays, and it doesn’t look very good on an iPad. 3) The ability to control the playback speed of animated data maps and the ability to scroll through them manually to see change over time in a specific area of interest. Many people (like me) are voracious readers and would love to learn more about the data we’re examining.”
“This is a pretty cool app with lots of information to display. It could use some work with updating the UI a little, especially for new notch phones.”
“This is a cool app, but the data is two years old. It’s nice to see how we are impacting this planet, but the data could be more today to see the hold in the ozone. It’s no wonder the planet is fighting back; it makes you wonder how bad the skin cancer rate will climb if we keep feeding on petroleum. We’re smarter than this, yet we choose to destroy the very Earth we live on. Where else is there to go? Let us keep this one.”
“They removed surface temperature by request of the scientists. What scientists? Whose data model was thrown off by those numbers? Give all the data and let users interpret the data. You could have easily left surface temperature data and added high-level atmospheric temperatures in place. Interactions and exchanges between the surface and atmospheric conditions are relevant and useful. For example, thermals.”
“NASA has a checkered history WRT mixing units of measurement. One would think that they had learned their lesson. The application should provide the user with temperatures in metric units of measurement, either Kelvin or Celsius. Other observations, such as the gravity field, sea level, etc., are metric units. Why not temperatures? Users! Give them an inch; they’ll take a mile!”
