Analysis-ready Mosaics: Introducing Surface Reflectance Basemaps

In a previous post, Alan introduced our Surface Reflectance imagery, an exciting product that delivers an accurate picture of what’s happening on the ground. By accounting for the effects of the atmosphere, sensor characteristics, and incident solar radiation, we aim to provide as near as possible to true reflectance of the Earth’s surface.

For our latest release, we’ve taken all the benefits of Surface Reflectance imagery and paired them with our Basemaps – wide area mosaics with preselected, composited, and gridded scenes. Voilá! We give you Surface Reflectance Basemaps, our analysis-ready, Basemaps product, which eliminates an enormous amount of processing work for our customers and partners.

Planet’s unmatched ability to provide daily coverage along with new atmospherically-corrected data allow us to deliver a basemap product no one else comes close to. These four-band basemaps are immediately useful for applications that perform quantitative analysis based on pixel values, across any area or time of interest.

False color composite imagery derived from weekly Surface Reflectance Basemaps over the month of December.

The most common of these is Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), used in agriculture and forestry from yield analysis to deforestation monitoring. However, our Surface Reflectance Basemaps are also readily processable for other analyses like Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), or any custom algorithm that utilizes four-band data of quantitative physical values.

We’ve taken care of all the upfront processing – all you need to do is take the pixels and run.

For more information on our Surface Reflectance Basemaps, watch our product overview below or read more on our Basemaps page.