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first published week of: 12/14/2015
Stitching together a live world map from many different satellite images lets algorithms keep an eye on the health of crops and problems like flooding.
It’s Earth as not even astronauts get to see it—completely without clouds.
Software developed by startup Descartes Labs stitches together daily satellite images into a live map of the planet’s surface and automatically edits out any cloud cover. That makes for a nicer view, and also helps algorithms that automatically track changes in land use or vegetation. The company says its software can make better forecasts of America’s corn crop than the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Descartes Labs was founded to commercialize image-recognition software developed for satellite and aerial imagery at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The software has been trained to identify features of Earth’s surface such as agriculture, water features, and types of forest by comparing annotated maps from sources like the U.S. Geological Survey with color, infrared, and ultraviolet satellite imagery.
Combining many satellite images makes it possible to watch changes in vegetation, crops, and land use over time, as seen here on the border between China and India. Algorithms can automatically track patterns, for example to predict the possible size of a harvest. continued…