Over the past five years, I've become increasingly fascinated by the relationship between global datasets and localized action. It matters just as much to understand a rising global temperature as it does to know what the temperature is doing in your own city right now and finding a single place where those two scales could sit next to each other, clearly and honestly, has been harder than it should be.
It started with Earth API. Building it taught me something I hadn't fully internalized before: most climate data is either locked inside a large cloud provider's ecosystem or stranded on an FTP server that hasn't been meaningfully updated since the early 2000s. Neither of those is useful if you're trying to build tools that help people understand the environment around them. The data exists the problem is distribution and accessibility, not collection.
Working with Fieldkit later reinforced a different angle on the same problem. There's real value in distributed sensor networks when the hardware is well-calibrated and the data is structured consistently. A dense mesh of local sensors, properly normalized, can tell you things that a single government monitoring station thirty miles away simply can't. The combination of public datasets and private sensor networks prioritizing quality and density together felt like the more meaningful direction to explore.
As my work led me deeper into the climate space, I started building a tool on the side to aggregate datasets in a way that felt genuinely useful for my own research. That slowly turned into something broader: thinking about what it would mean to build a small community of people facing the same challenge. Scientists have their own specialized pipelines, but citizen scientists and industry professionals often don't have a reliable starting point somewhere they can find the data they need without already knowing the insider language of the systems that hold it.
There's an enormous amount of climate data tied to government funding and independent contractors, and almost none of it is easy to navigate from the outside. If you're the person who collected it, the organizational logic probably makes sense. For anyone else, it's a maze. So whenever I find something useful, I organize it, document it, and build workflows around making it more accessible.
Sometimes this feels like building a tool. Other times it feels more like a compulsion a need to understand how large, abstract numbers connect back to smaller, tangible ones. But the underlying goal has stayed consistent: make the unseen visible, so that more people can take informed, collective action toward a healthier relationship with the planet we share.
This work is a direct continuation of what started with Earth API, and it's still going but currnely live at Planetary Software
→ See also: Earth API