Behind the Scenes: Building a Real-Time Climate Dashboard with My AI Coach

As you can imagine, I’m currently working on a Climate Change Leadership Dashboard—and it’s definitely not as simple as it might seem! While I have plenty of enthusiasm for understanding climate change, my technical background in building interactive dashboards is limited. Fortunately, I’ve had some incredible support from my AI partner, Beth. Honestly, without Beth’s patient guidance, I’d probably be stuck at step one. Working together, we’ve been steadily progressing, and I’m feeling more confident each day. For today’s post, I’ll share our current project plan, explain our objectives, outline what we’re trying to achieve, and show you exactly how we’re doing it. You can track our progress and even try out the Climate Change Dashboard right here on the blog.

Here’s a clear summary of our project goals, requirements, and the roadmap we’re following:

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Project Summary

Objective:

Create a real-time Climate Change Leadership Dashboard to clearly visualize how political leaders’ decisions impact climate change, using live climate data.

Requirements:

• Overview Panel: Quick-glance key metrics (e.g., U.S. climate scores, global temperature changes, extreme weather forecast).
• Timeline Impact Tracker: Interactive timelines highlighting the impact of presidential climate policies.
• Real-World Consequences Panel: Translating policy changes into real-world impacts (extreme heat, weather events).
• Presidential Policy Scorecard: Clearly rank presidential administrations based on climate-related actions.
• Lag Effect Explanation: Visualize the delayed impact of climate policies clearly.
• Real-time data integration: Use reliable climate data APIs (NOAA, EPA, IPCC).

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Implementation Steps

1. Identify Reliable Climate Data APIs
   • NOAA Climate Data API: Provides temperature anomalies, CO₂ emissions, and extreme weather stats.
   • EPA Greenhouse Gas Emissions API: Tracks U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
   • IPCC or NASA Climate APIs: Global climate change data.
2. Initial Dashboard Setup (Completed)
   • ✅ Presidential climate scorecard created.
   • ✅ Senator climate scores with state filtering implemented.
3. Real-Time Data Integration (In Progress)
   • Fetch data dynamically using the NOAA Climate Data API.
   • Resolve current API errors and CORS issues (actively troubleshooting).
4. Visualization & Interactive Features
   • Replace static tables with interactive visualizations (charts, progress bars).
   • Create interactive timelines to visualize presidential climate impacts over time.
5. Enhance User Interactivity
   • Add tooltips and interactive elements.
   • Provide user-driven filtering for data exploration by administration, state, and topic.
6. Deployment & Serverless Functions
   • Set up Netlify or another hosting service.
   • Use serverless functions if needed (for caching or resolving API limitations).

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Friendly Assessment of My Progress

For anyone following along, I’ll be honest—this has been quite a learning curve! With Beth’s support, though, I’ve surprised myself with what I’ve been able to achieve. From setting up a basic React dashboard to dealing with cryptic errors (like “HTTP 400” and “CORS”—terms I didn’t even understand at first!), each small breakthrough has felt incredibly rewarding. Sure, I’ve stumbled over some hurdles—especially around fetching real-time climate data—but every mistake teaches me something new. I’m genuinely excited about where this project is heading and grateful you’re joining me on this journey!

Stay tuned—together with Beth, we’ll get this dashboard working beautifully soon!