Crop Yield Mapping with ARC using only Optical Remote Sensing

Land surface temperature and surface net radiation are vital inputs for many land surface and hydrological models. However, current remote sensing datasets of these variables come mostly at coarse resolutions, and the few high-resolution datasets available have large gaps due to cloud cover. Here, we present a continuous daily product for both variables across Europe for 2018–2019 obtained by combining observations from geostationary as well as polar-orbiting satellites.

We provide a data set to support mapping croplands in smallholder landscapes in Ghana. The data set contains information on crop location on three agroecological zones for 2 years, temporal series of measurements of leaf area index and leaf chlorophyll concentration for maize canopies and yield. We demonstrate the use of these data to validate cropland masks, create a maize mask using satellite data and explore the relationship between satellite measurements and yield.

The proposed SIAC atmospheric correction method provides consistent surface reflectance estimations from medium spatial-resolution satellites (Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8) with per-pixel uncertainty information. The outputs from SIAC have been validated against a wide range of ground measurements, and it shows that SIAC can provide accurate estimations of both surface reflectance and atmospheric parameters, with meaningful uncertainty information.

We describe the way that our group have chosen to perform our recent analyses of the Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project ensemble simulations. We document the approach used to obtain and curate the simulations, process those outputs via the Climate Variability Diagnostics Package, and then continue through to compute ensemble-wide statistics and create figures. We also provide interim data from all steps, the codes used and the ability for users to perform their own analyses.

We estimate the uncertainties associated with three global satellite-derived burned area estimates. The method provides unique uncertainties for the three estimates at the global scale for 2001–2013. We find uncertainties of 4 %–5.5 % in global burned area and uncertainties of 8 %–10 % in the frequently burning regions of Africa and Australia.