Radar products

We have integrated Sentinel-1 radar products in our agknowledge API! The advantage of radar products is that they are available independant of cloud coverage and can therefore increase data availability in cloudy regions, e.g. for crop monitoring, prediction models or crop mapping.

A Sentinel-1 VH backscatter image and the corresponding time series for a grass field over a season

These are processed by Kappazeta, a reknown company in the field of radar processing and seamlessly integrated in our field monitoring API to deliver object based images and time series statistics as you get also for Sentinel-2 products. They are processed using cutting edge technologies, e.g. excellent speckle filtering and comprise these products:

  • VV/VH Backscatter
  • VV/VH Coherence
  • SBMI Synthetic Biomass Index

While backscatter can be an interesting product for custom model development and crop mapping, coherence is an interesting product for field activity detection (e.g. ploughing) as the coherence basically tells you if the surface and water content of the monitored field changed significantly between the two dates used to calculate the coherence.

The most interesting product for agricultural applications like crop monitoring or model development is the SBMI, though. It is a synthetic biomass index derived from the combination of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data which are quite complementary concerning its information content. While Sentinel-2 has multispectral capabilities that are based on the vegetation’s absorbtion of sun light by Chlorophyll, leaf structure, leaf water content and pigments, Sentinel-1’s radar capabilities make it cloud independant which guarantees constant observations even during bad weather conditions.