Biomass Proxy Release Notes

Version 3.4: Sugar Maple

Summary

This release includes a fix to deliver data in regions with a very persistent cloud cover. In these regions, given the lack of sufficient cloud-free optical images for the areas of interest, the biomass proxy signal relies more on the spatial information from Sentinel-1 observations. In these situations, the metadata includes a quality flag that indicates that the data generated for the field has been produced under extreme cloudy conditions, and thus, the spatial quality of the data produced is likely impacted.

Date:

August 2023

Version 3.0: Sugar Maple

Summary

With version 3.0 a number of significant quality improvements were made, along with inclusion of metadata information in the daily geotiffs as well as the resolution of several bugfixes impacting the overall quality of the product:

  • Detection, mitigation and removal of temporal peak outliers in the radar observations, leading to a more accurate representation of the field biomass value.

  • Implementation of a harvest index method to detect harvest events more accurately and assimilate those in the biomass proxy signal leading to an improved temporal representation of such events.

  • Inclusion of the following metadata in the daily geotiffs output: Dates of the latest direct observations from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 used as well as the percentage of saturated pixels within the field.

  • Various algorithm improvements solving anormal behaviours and thereby improving the components responsible for the daily data production.

Date:

February 2023

Version 2.0: Langenfeld

Summary

With version 2.0 a number of significant R&D improvements were made, along with changes to the processing chain and order and delivery mechanism:

  • Improvements to Sentinel-2 cloud masks increases the number of images available for the data fusion.

  • Improvements to filtering of Sentinel-1 scenes increases the spatial accuracy of the final product.

  • Field-based processing: Biomass Proxy data is now requested and delivered via the Subscriptions API (Data subscriptions) for a specific date range and for a single field geometry.

Date:

February 2022

Version 1.0: Langano

Summary

The Langano release is the first operational release of the Biomass Proxy.

Date:

April 2021