Focus on Climate Change: Columbia Students Develop NOAH Water Data Journalism Resource

We are pleased to present a new series about how Columbia Journalism School has been training its students to become leading climate change reporters. With changes in the climate endangering lives, ecologies, and economies at global and local levels, the work of journalists is vital for effectively and accurately explaining the science and implications of climate change to the public.  Today, we spotlight NOAH, a new water data mapping resource for journalists that was developed with a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation by a team that included Columbia Journalism School students Disha Shetty (M.A. Science '18), Maya T. Miller (M.A. Science '18),  Pankhuri Kumar (Dual M.S. in Journalism and Computer Science '19), and Ravie Lakshmanan (Dual M.S. in Journalism and Computer Science '18). 

With climate change contributing to more extreme conditions around the globe, NOAH's mapping helps make water data more accessible and understandable, giving journalists new opportunities to discover otherwise hard-to-find trends and underlying stories about droughts, monsoons, floods, downstream effects, and other water security-related issues. 

The idea for NOAH was sparked in 2018 when Disha Shetty, a science journalist from India, was a student in Columbia Journalism School's Master of Arts Program, Science Concentration. While studying at Columbia, Shetty visited a class taught by climate scientist Pietro Ceccato about using climate data in public health work. Shetty explained to Professor Ceccato that she wanted to learn how to use data more effectively in reporting on climate change. They soon proposed a project that could combine journalism and climate data.  After receiving a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, which offers funding to projects that advance storytelling and journalism through original technology development, Shetty and Ceccato brought aboard Shetty's then-classmates Kumar, Lakshmanan, and Miller to create the water data mapping application. 

Within a year, the team successfully produced NOAH, which presents mapping that depicts shifts in rainfall and surface water patterns across the planet over the last four decades.  This information allows journalists and researchers around the world to compare changes in the water surface level and rainfall highs and lows, giving them the ability to identify how their community has been affected by water fluctuations, and by how much. When a climate or water event takes place, NOAH provides historical and current data to deepen reporting. After developing NOAH, Disha Shetty was quickly able to use it to find data and create visualizations for her 2019 IndiaSpend story about how climate change has impacted the lives of people on the India-Bangladesh border.

Thanks to the efforts of Columbia Journalism School students and the support of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, NOAH now allows journalists to gather data that will provide context for unprecedented and accurate stories about the impacts of climate change on our water security. 

Please watch the video below to learn from Disha Shetty about how the training she received in Columbia Journalism School's Master of Arts Program informs her current climate change reporting.



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