GEO-AWS EO Cloud Credits Programme

Project Title: AWS4AgriSAR-Crop inventory mapping from SAR data on cloud computing platform

Project Lead: Dr. Avik Bhattacharya

Agency/institution: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

Mailing address: Microwave Remote Sensing Lab, Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering,

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India 400076

Operational crop monitoring through crop growth descriptors benefits from Earth Observation (EO) data with high temporal revisit and extended spatial coverage. “Considering the new generation dense time series dataset from constellation of SAR satellites (Sentinel-1, RCM, SAOCOM), the operational applications over an agricultural region would be inhibited by computational challenges given such a high volume of data rate”, pointed out by Dr. Dipankar Mandal (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay), a Co-Principal Investigator of AWS4AgriSAR project.

“We are developing important processing chains for crop biophysical parameter estimation using SAR data in AWS platform through the GEO-Amazon Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme. The goal of the present research is to evaluate the potential and transferability of the model inversion technique from a point scale to a regional test site”, added by Prof. Avik Bhattacharya (Microwave Remote Sensing Lab, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay), Principal Investigator of AWS4AgriSAR project. These new strategies opened the route to develop operational agriculture monitoring services within the Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) international research network. Notably, early estimates and crop condition assessment would reduce the agricultural risk. This research proposes operational exploitation of remote sensing data to produce high-resolution crop specific maps as analysis ready data (ARD) products.