If you're a data scientist or pride yourself on writing perfect database queries, there's a fascinating challenge tailored just for you. UN Global Pulse and Western Digital are issuing the Data for Climate Action Challenge, a unique contest that gives you access to an enormous amount of anonymized behavioral, satellite, and weather data. Your job, should you choose to apply and are selected, is to use that data to help society learn more about climate change, and how we can slow it down.

As UN Global Pulse and Western Digital put it in a release, “The challenge aims to generate original research papers and tools that demonstrate how data-driven innovation can inform on-the-ground solutions and transform efforts to fight climate change.”

Companies ranging from telecoms and social media analytics firms to banks and traffic app makers will contribute to the challenge through what UN Global Pulse calls data philanthropy, where companies release data that will help policy makers and serve the public good. Participants in the challenge can apply for access to data related to mobile phone usage, mobility and traffic patterns, satellite imagery, social media, weather, and more. The data sets themselves are privacy protected and aggregated for those purposes.

Publicly available and open datasets will also be available for the challenge. There are countless ways that the research could go, from looking at urban heat island effects and traffic in cities, to exploring how satellite data reveals long-term drought patterns or sudden shifts in resource availability. Social media might reveal patterns in energy preferences, or how people talk about climate change.

Participants will have nearly five months to conduct research and create a final product. A mixed panel of experts in climate change and data science will evaluate the submissions and choose winners in October 2017.

By organizing challenges like this, the UN Global Pulse also hopes to demonstrate the value of corporations releasing data in a responsible, privacy-protected way to spark innovation for the public good. Where appropriate, the companies who have agreed to share their data are aggregating and anonymizing their data sets.

The more we understand patterns in human behavior, the better we can figure out how to make our civilizations environmentally sustainable over the long term. That's why we're urging Ars Technica readers to submit proposals to the challenge, which you can do via the Data For Climate Action website. This is an excellent opportunity to gain access to data we rarely see, and to use it for humanitarian purposes. Even if you are not a coder, share your ideas and insights in the comments. Together we can make an impact.

Listing image by NASA