Insights into Vegetation Dynamics and Terrestrial Evaporation

Planet’s constellation of satellites, with daily revisit rates and sub 5 m resolution, provides the ability to overcome the usual spatiotemporal restrictions associated with traditional remote sensing.

Matt McCabe and team explore the suitability of Planet imagery for an array of retrieval opportunities pertinent to hydrology, including leaf area index (LAI) and surface evaporation: two variables that are of interest in water, carbon, and energy balance studies.

The study presents the highest resolution evaporation estimates ever produced from space, and the first LAI estimates from the Planet constellation.

Read the full paper, published in the journal Water Resources Research, here.

McCabe et al. used a mix of tandem Dove, Landsat and eddy covariance measurements to produce the highest resolution estimates of crop water use from space.