If you go
What: Boulder Data Rescue
When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday
Where: CU William A. Wise Law Library, 2405 Kittredge Loop Drive
Cost: Free, but space is limited
More info: Tickets available at eventbrite.com/e/data-rescue-boulder-tickets-31995427184
A Lyons business and a University of Colorado law student are leading a team of volunteers in the fight to save decades of precious climate data they say is under siege by a hostile presidential administration.
Data company Cloud BIRST is hosting Data Rescue Boulder, a two-day, all-volunteer hackathon at CU that will attempt to archive as many digital records as humanly possible.
The data has come from thousands of monitoring stations across the U.S., tracking temperature, precipitation, carbon monoxide levels and even chemical spills — some of it dating back to 1901.
“We’re going to save it so that it remains free and open and available for future researchers, students and industry,” said Joan Saez, of Cloud BIRST, which is sponsoring the event.
Data Rescue Boulder is part of a larger nationwide effort that started at the University of Pennsylvania following President Donald Trump’s election. The fear was that valuable data would start to disappear from the websites of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That fear became reality following inauguration. Sites started to go dark, and data started to disappear. The UPenn team started a “data death clock” to track what has been lost.
“There’s always a choice of funding for any administration, and it’s very easy to imagine where there’s not funding to support public domain servers” on which the data is kept, Saez said. Climate science “does not have a favorable status with this administration.”
Data rescue events have been held across the country, organized by multiple groups. They’ve archived the websites for NOAA, EPA, NASA’s earth science program, the Department of Energy and others.
Data Rescue Boulder will focus exclusively on EPA data, and will likely be the biggest and most complex hackathon to date, organizers say.
That’s because while many events are merely archiving websites — which might give annual totals of, say, emissions in Los Angeles County — the Boulder volunteers will be accessing and preserving the raw data.
“We’re going to save every single data point that’s ever been created on those stations,” Saez said.
The work has already begun: A team of 20 volunteers are processing about 12 data sets per hour.
CU organizer Stephanie Minutillo said she is expecting about 40 people per day to show up at the law library to help. A laptop is all that’s needed — no special skills are required.
“The more hands on deck, the better,” she said. “We’re also hoping someone from the community can help cater or provide snacks of some sort.”
The work will continue after the hackathon has wrapped, according to Saez, and continue for as long as there is publicly available data left to capture.
“There are 1 million records being created any given month,” she said. “It’s all at risk.”
A previous version of this article incorrectly said Cloud BIRST was located in Lafayette.
Shay Castle: 303-473-1626, castles@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/shayshinecastle
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