Product and Algorithm Information

For years, global food security has been at the forefront as one of the most pressing development targets. According to the FAO, food production around the world has to grow by more than 70% if we want to achieve food for all in 2050. Both public and private organizations bear a huge responsibility to raise food production in a sustainable way. Remote Sensing and especially satellite missions delivering daily global observations, like PROBA-V, are crucial to monitor the status of crops worldwide and predict yields.

Land is an essential natural resource - for humanity and all terrestrial ecosystems. But while resources are strictly finite, human demands are not. Today, this leads to events such as deforestation, soil degradation and the loss of wildlife. PROBA-V, the small satellite for global observations, helps monitor and map the extent and dynamics of land cover and land use.

Global daily satellite observations are indispensable to monitor the driving forces of climate change, arguably the largest and most challenging problem our society is facing. Additionally, remote sensing serves to monitor the effects of climate change, e.g. changes in land cover and land use. Hereto PROBA-V satellite imagery with low spatial resolution but delivering daily global coverage is invaluable.

Although PROBA-V is designed as a land mission, the good image quality provides opportunities to extend its applications to coastal waters.  By applying a dedicated atmospheric correction above water  we can derive information on the turbidity of the water and the suspended sediment concentration. Combining these turbidity and suspended sediment products from PROBA-V with products from other typical Ocean Colour sensors allows for better monitoring of turbidity in dynamic near shore areas and it increases the chance to detect short term events in particular for areas with rapid changing cloud cover.