World-first service letting farmers see through clouds

The new 'ClearSky' service, launching imminently in the UK, feeds radar data into a deep neural network to derive the view of a field that a satellite would see if there were no clouds blocking its camera.

This innovation means that farmers using ClearSky are guaranteed to receive an image every 6 days showing them how their crop is developing, whatever the weather. This is in contrast to traditional, weather-dependent imagery which can often have gaps of several weeks between cloud-free views.

Madhumita Mund Rao, Head of Data at Origin Digital, said: "This is a hugely exciting development, because it adds the ingredient of dependable regularity that's missing in traditional imagery services. This reliability will give UK farmers a substantial new advantage in sustainably optimising their yield and input use."

"At any given time an average of 67% of the Earth is covered by clouds, so precision agriculture systems that rely on getting clear satellite imagery at the right time have historically struggled to deliver on their high potential value. ClearSky eliminates that struggle by guaranteeing the consistent regularity these systems need to deliver results, enabling farmers to fully optimise their fertiliser use for example and helping both their wallets and the planet," she continued.

Analysis by Origin Digital shows that the widely used European Space Agency 'Sentinel 2' satellites produced 13 clear images per UK farm on average in 2021. In contrast, the ClearSky technology developed by Aspia Space uses revolutionary techniques to produce more than 60 cloud-free images per year, which can be used alongside the clear images captured by Sentinel 2 and other providers.

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Source: Agritech Future