White House Launches new Climate Data Initiative...

We are in the lovely "Indian Treaty" room.And we were there! Kevin and I went to the White House (here is photographic proof) to represent Cal-Adapt.

The President’s Climate Data Initiative was launched March 19th with the tagline: Empowering America’s Communities to Prepare for the Effects of Climate Change. The initiative is a complex partnership of government, industry, academia and local public to get the US ready for climate change. The overall goal of the climate data initiative is "Spark Innovation": release data, articulate challenges, turn data scientists loose. Here is the fact sheet and a blog post from John Podesta and John Holdren.

We saw some very interesting short talks from a range of speakers. Here are some highlights:

Jack Dangermond highlighted the many initiatives that ESRI is pushing to help with climate resilience. Kathyrn Sullivan from NOAA discussed her concept of "Environmental Intelligence", which describes the use of data to create resilience. She says: "NOAA capture 20TB daily, they release 2TB daily. Upon that data stream are built all the climate businesses we have today. What would this industry be like if we release the other 18TB?" Ellen Stofan from NASA talked about new earth observation missions, including satellites for precipitation, soil moisture, CO2, winds, aerosols. She announced another of a series of data driven challenges called "coastal inundation in your community". Rachel Kyte from the World Bank called their multiple initiatives "Open Data for Resilience". She said that climate change may eradicate the mission of the World Bank, because of its disproportionate impact on poorer communities worldwide. Rebecca More from Google gave us a fantastic overview of the Landsat, climate and topography missions that Google Earth Engine is working on. Google is contributing 1PT cloud storage, and 50 million CPU hours of collaboration.

Videos:

• John Podesta, Counselor to the President, The White House
• Jack Dangermond, Founder and CEO, Esri
• Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan,  Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, U.S. Department of Commerce
• Stephen Harper, Global Director, Environment and Energy Policy,  Intel Corporation
• Joel Dunn, Executive Director, Chesapeake Conservancy
• Denice Ross, Director of Enterprise Information, City of New Orleans
• Dr. Ellen Stofan, Chief Scientist, NASA
• Rachel Kyte,  Vice President and Special Envoy for Climate Change, The World Bank
• Rebecca Moore, Founder, Google Earth Engine

All was very inspiring and informative.

Here are some press links about the Initiative:

• http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/03/19/climate-data-initiative-launches-strong-public-and-private-sector-commitments
• http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/19/fact-sheet-president-s-climate-data-initiative-empowering-america-s-comm
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/19/wh-launches-new-climate-data-initiative-wednesday/
• The Indian Treaty Room where we mingled: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Treaty_Room
  (By the way, the Bretton Woods agreements, the peace treaties with Italy, Hungary, and Romania after World War II, and the United Nations Charter were all signed in this room.)