Data commons for climate, energy, and sustainability

Team: Ram Rajagopal, Arun Majumdar, Gretchen Daily, Noah Diffenbaugh, Alexandra Konings, David Lobell
Mid-range (Developing)

The goal of this project was to develop a platform that provides access to research data from the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and also links to thousands of datasets in the Google Data Commons platform. We created the Stanford Data Commons, an open-source hosting platform that can aggregate data spatially and temporally. People without technical knowledge can access the platform and query, explore, and visualize datasets in real time or download the data and analyze it later. 

Stanford has contributed several datasets and variables to this project. Datasets describe, for example, electrical grid power line distribution and cost for undergrounding electrical power lines; commercial, residential, and utility-scale solar installations; air quality index and air pollutant concentrations; and historical and projected sea level rise. We have also added Global Climate Model Projections (the Coupled Intercomparison Project). We plan to encourage Stanford community members to contribute data, refine the natural disaster tracking dashboard, and streamline access so users can easily share and publish contributed data.

This project also contributes toward the Climate Adaptation flagship destination.