NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. government needs you, and other citizen scientists, to use freely available climate data for creating apps that focus on dealing with future problems and risks caused in the country by climate change.

The Climate Resilience Data Challenge, which begins today and runs through March 2015, will award over $35,000 in prizes to those with ideas that use the federal government's readily available climate data to help the country face the challenges that climate change brings.

"Federal agencies, such as NASA and the USGS, traditionally focus on developing world-class science data to support scientific research, but the rapid growth in the innovation community presents new opportunities to encourage wider usage and application of science data to benefit society," says Kevin Murphy, NASA program executive for Earth Science Data Systems. "We need tools that utilize federal data to help our local communities improve climate resilience, protect our ecosystems, and prepare for the effects of climate change."

The new challenge is part of the White House Climate Data Initiative, which offers the data free to entrepreneurs and citizen scientists. According to the latest National Climate Assessment, the U.S. is already experiencing impacts from climate change, with more expected in the future. This includes more extreme weather events, factors that affect human health, damages to infrastructure, disruptions in agriculture and water supplies, and damage to oceans and ecosystems.

The challenge is meant for not just estimating when and where these climate change risks arise, but also what we can do to better address them.

Interested citizen scientists can register for the competition on the TopCoder website.

For those participating in the challenge, the first stage is for submitting proposals and ideas about how best to use current data sources for new applications. That stage is followed by storyboarding, which is where citizen scientists visualize those ideas. In the final stage of the competition, the finalists will build prototypes of their apps, taking their ideas and making them real.

"Government science follows the strictest professional protocols because scientific objectivity is what the American people expect from us," says Virginia Burkett, acting USGS associate director for climate change and land use. "With this challenge, however, we are intentionally looking outside the box for transformational ways to apply the data that we have already carefully assembled for the benefit of communities across the nation."

[Photo Credit: Climate Data Resilience Challenge]