4 posts
A free, phone-friendly check for any farm: whether the rains have started, when they usually start, rain and heat for the next 10 days and how green the crops are. Examples from Lilongwe, Malawi, and Gazipur, Bangladesh.
Estimate surface soil moisture from free Sentinel-1 radar in Python with the TU Wien change-detection method. Build dry and wet references per orbit, map relative soil moisture at 100 m, and test it honestly against four COSMOS-UK stations and their rain gauges.
Monitor crops through cloud with free Sentinel-1 radar. Build VV, VH and VH/VV ratio time series for 247 fields in Cambridgeshire, beat speckle by field-averaging, read the growth signatures of winter wheat and oilseed rape, and compare with the gaps that cloud leaves in Sentinel-2 NDVI.
Build a five-year Sentinel-2 NDVI time series in Python: load a lazy dask datacube with odc-stac, mask cloud with SCL, make monthly composites, extract field curves and derive crop phenology.