Terra Daily: Data from the US Food and Agriculture Organization indicates that annually 2500 km3 of freshwater are used for agricultural production, which amounts to 70% of the water resources the whole of humanity consumes in a year. With the global population continuing to grow at a high pace, it is essential to optimize the use of water resources and to increase agricultural production in view of the prospect of having to feed 8 billion humans in 2030.Scientists have for many years been using remote-sensing satellite observations to improve water balance and farming yield assessment on large geographical scales (at the level of irrigated agriculture areas, catchment basins and so on). Until quite recently, scientists had two different observation methods available for doing that: wide field-of-view sensors (TERRA-MODIS or SPOT-VEGETATION), which allowed daily observation of the entire globe but with a resolution on the kilometric scale, generally extending far over that of one parcel of crops, or decametre-scale-resolution sensors (SPOT, Landsat, ASTER), which can yield only one or two observations per month.
Since 2004, the Taiwanese satellite FORMOSTAT-2 has been in operation, combining the functional features of these two observation techniques, albeit without providing an exhaustive cover of the continents. It gives the possibility for daily observation of small areas of around 500 km at a spatial resolution of about 8 metres….
A harvesting combine in Poland, shot by Ludek, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2
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