Earth Pulse is a ground-level environmental observatory on the edge of the Western Ghats — tracking air, climate, sound, and biodiversity from one location, continuously, since January 2022.
To build the most detailed, long-term, freely accessible environmental record of a single location in urban India — combining air quality, microclimate, acoustic biodiversity, and visual documentation into one continuous, open dataset.
Most environmental data is regional and aggregated. Earth Pulse is hyperlocal and hourly. The goal is to reveal patterns that regional data cannot — the morning AQI spike before traffic, the temperature drop when the first monsoon cloud passes, the exact day a migratory bird arrives.
Over time this becomes more than data. It becomes memory, evidence, and a foundation for understanding how a place changes — accessible not just to researchers, but to anyone curious about the world around them.
The most significant readings in our dataset since January 2022. Register free to access the full records table with timestamps and context.
Hourly data is fetched from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) via Open-Meteo — the same data used by European environmental agencies. Parameters include PM2.5, PM10, NO₂, ozone, CO, SO₂, ammonia, and European AQI.
India AQI is independently sourced from the Google Air Quality API, which applies India's own national standard (0–500 scale). Both are stored side by side for every hour.
BirdNET — the neural network developed by the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell Lab of Ornithology — runs continuously on a Raspberry Pi facing the Sahyadri foothills. It listens during dawn chorus, evening chorus, and overnight.
Each detection is logged with its confidence score and matched with the climate reading at that exact hour — enabling correlations between air quality, weather, and bird activity.
Photographs of Baner Hill are archived with their original EXIF timestamps, resized to 1280×720, and stored alongside the climate reading recorded at that exact moment. This links every visual observation to a precise environmental context.
Gaps caused by power outages are automatically filled on the next system boot using historical archive APIs. The database uses upsert logic — re-running any script is always safe and never creates duplicates.
All data is stored in UTC and displayed in IST (Asia/Kolkata). Backfill covers January 2022 to present.
All Earth Pulse data is freely available for research, journalism, education, and personal use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may use, share, and adapt the data for any purpose — including commercial — with attribution.
For research collaboration, data access requests, or press enquiries: contact us →