In the southwestern United States, a looming wall of dust can bear down frightfully fast on communities, ruining visibility for drivers and becoming a breathing hazard that can have long-lasting health effects. The National Weather Service uses satellite data to forecast these dust storms, and now four Maryland high-school students designed an app called DustWatch, that will allow people to have faster access to dust storm information.
Feedback also came from a broader audience. In December, the students gave a talk about DustWatch at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Washington, and in January 2019, they presented at the HAQAST semi-annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. At each meeting they talked with dust researchers and air quality scientists, some of whom live in Arizona and New Mexico, who offered insights on living with dust storms and how to improve DustWatch’s features.
“This experience definitely gave our team a boost of confidence and helped validate our idea,” said Kevin Liu, a rising sophomore at River Hill High School in Clarksville, Maryland. “The feedback they offered helped us better understand issues with our app and provided direction on how to improve it.”
The students said they were drawn to the problem-solving aspects of taking a big problem and breaking it down into a series of smaller problems that they could actually solve. What ultimately kept them going, however, was knowing that their app could help people forecast the unexpected and unpredictable dust storms.
“In middle school I gave a lot of thought to what I want to be when I grew up, and I thought like a pilot or something, because that’s cool, flying airplanes,” said Alex Xie, a rising sophomore at Gilman Upper School in Baltimore, Maryland. “But I realized that I wanted to do something that positively impacted the world. That’s why I wanted to build this app.”
With DustWatch now available on iOS, the students’ next project is to make an Android version. After that, they have a list of new features they want to add, including customized dust warnings for driving routes and the ability for users to enter data on dust observations and dust-related damage or illnesses that will flow back to scientists who are improving the dust forecasts and studying their impacts on communities.
