Environment Systems has recently acted as a consultant on this project funded under the UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Space Programme (IPSP). The project investigated the feasibility of Earth Observation derived services/ products available through a specific geospatial data infrastructure (data cube) focused on the Australian agricultural monitoring market. A data cube consists of a consistent architecture that indexes data spatially (X/Y) and temporally (Z), and supports rapid access and retrieval of data across these axes on request.

A number of agricultural demonstrators also took place as part of the IPSP collaboration. These included the integration of satellite SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imagery into the data cube which involved developing an automated processing system for Sentinel 1 data and generating analysis ready data. Other demonstrators focused on using Sentinel data and optical imagery to predict yields for sugar cane and wheat.

Environment Systems ran two government stakeholder engagement workshops to investigate the proposed value of services and the role of organisations within the satellite product delivery chain. The data cube concept presents a huge opportunity for delivering services into agricultural markets. The agricultural demonstrator projects show that the availability of SAR data will be a key enabler for this, and together with optical satellite data, can answer the needs of a diverse range of agricultural customers.

You can view the full Satellite Applications Catapult case study ‘Collaborative Synthetic Aperture Radar Solutions for Australia’ – here.