Ag Tech News
Ag Tech: Satellite imagery to Large-Scale Monitoring of Asia’s Rice Areas.
To help guide policy making related to food security and sustainable development, particularly in rice-growing areas, information derived from satellite images can soon be made available to governments.
The European Space Agency (ESA) satellite, Sentinel-1A, launched in 2014 can provide regular ‛snapshots’ of Asia. The imagery is derived from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems that can monitor the earth’s surface day and night, even though rain or cloud cover hence, images even during the monsoon season making the tool perfect for rice crop monitoring.
Sarmap and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) have generated mosaics, composed from several Sentinel-1A images that cover 7 million square kilometres of South and Southeast Asia, as a demonstration of the potential of the Sentinel program. Detailed SAR imagery for accurate monitoring of agricultural activity and of the state of natural resources across Asia are shown by these cloud-free mosaics.