Many hundreds of imaging smallsats orbit our planet gathering data essential to understand Earth in near real-time. Imaging smallsats have potential to provide groundbreaking insights but face a significant challenge: image distortion caused by light transmission through the Earth’s atmosphere. This challenge grows each year as air pollution and wildfire smoke increase due to climate change and population growth.

Enter RESOLV, a revolutionary solution leveraging Closed Form Method for Atmospheric Correction (CMAC) technology. Unlike existing methods , RESOLV swiftly and precisely corrects smallsat images using only the data from the image. Its efficiency comes from a completely different approach that enhances accuracy and reliability, delivered without delay waiting for ancillary data.

Understanding Atmospheric Correction

Atmospheric correction is vital for agriculture because it refines images for clear viewing, converting digital signals into surface reflectance. This correction removes the impact of atmospheric aerosol particles that obscure ground features and muddle digital signals. Achieving accurate surface reflectance is crucial for robust analytics and insights to serve precision agriculture.

Enhancing Agriculture

Analytics from satellite data would seem to be the perfect application for precision agriculture and less than a decade ago, the agriculture industry was a’buzz with speculation for how satellite data would be a transformation. Today, agriculture barely applies this rich source for actionable information. What happened? The industry learned that unless the data are corrected to surface reflectance, the resulting analytics wax and wane depending upon the level of haze in the image: effectively useless for comparison between seasons, or fields, or scaling treatments. Existing methods for atmospheric correction have increasingly failed Midwest farmers in recent years and now for months at a time due to the smoke from North American wildfires. This can all change now through RESOLV that was developed specifically for smallsats with an eye on agriculture and the increasing haze. The Sentinel-2 NDVI Application topic paper  takes a close look at this problem: Sentinel 2 is our testbed, smallsat applications can now be highly accurate. RESOLV upgrades NDVI for a new world of applications, including a brand-new method to index crop start dates (goodbye growing degree days!)

Sentinel-2 images of farmland near Spirit Lake, Iowa, July 3, 2023, before and after RESOLV correction.

About the Author

Hello,

I’m Dr. David Groeneveld, founder and leader of RESOLV™. Our software atmospherically corrects smallsat data conveniently, accurately and reliably and does so in near real time. The benefits of RESOLV™ go beyond its technical capabilities. Better accuracy helps researchers, scientists, and others make smarter choices to monitor and manage our planet.

Curious to learn more about RESOLV™, the science behind it and its potential for correcting smallsat images? Fill out this short form and I’ll be in touch.