Precise, Global Temperature Data for a Growing Planet

Project Information

HiVE

Grant agreement ID: 190139307

DOI

10.3030/190139307

Project closed

EC signature date 17 November 2022

Start date 1 December 2022

End date 31 July 2025

Funded under

• The European Innovation Council (EIC)

Total cost

€ 3 506 281,25

EU contribution

€ 2 454 396,88

Coordinated by

CONSTELLR GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - HiVE (Precise, Global Temperature Data for a Growing Planet)

Reporting period: 2024-05-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Food security is an urgent global challenge. To feed a population of 10 bn by 2050, we must produce 50% more food despite water scarcity, loss of arable land, & climate change. Lack of water (water stress) severely reduces crop yields. The inability to measure water stress accurately leads to unpredictable and low-yielding harvests, impacting the entire food supply chain from farm viability to food prices. Current crop health data is not fit for purpose, leading to ineffective irrigation consuming 70% of global freshwater. constellr will provide the first high-precision temperature data at field level, daily & globally from a uniquely scalable constellation of microsatellites (called HiVE), enabling water stress detection in time to prevent yield loss and explore temperature data for a variety of other models such as yield prediction and forestry applications. Under the EIC project constellr has developed a second generation satellite design and a complementary software infrastructure, generating, processing and distributing the data required to increase global food production by up to 4%, reduce agricultural water waste by up to 180 gigatons, & avoid up to 94M tons of CO2 emissions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To achieve the project objectives, constellr has engaged in the following primary activities as per scope of the project:
• Engaging early adopter customers in pilots and data product value demonstrations to ensure uptake of land-surface-temperature as a crucial data point in farming operations, supporting the goal of improving precision farming. Over the proect duration,constellr has been able to triple the Early Access Programme volume and sales pipeline. Through early customer engagement and Proof-of-Concept studies, constellr has also refined its product portfolio for commercial launch operations.
• Enhancing our early Mission Planning (MPS) and Mission Control (MCS) system to a robust, scalable system, able to handle a full constellation of satellites and thus supporting our commercial scale up. Within this project, constellr has elevated and improved the baseline design to an operational system, MPS and MCS have been integrated into an End to End System enabling the automated processing of customer orders to from the End User Platform to injecting the raw data into out data processing pipeline. The system has been released to production and is in active use for the first two satellites already.
• Developing a second-generation satellite design to be more capable and robust in delivering land-surface-temperature data from space. We have iternatively improved the first generation design, based on product performance requirements derived from end-user feedback from proof-of-concept studies conducted since project start, as well as enhancing the robustness & maturity of the first generation design, ensuring the satellites meet lifetime and availablity targets of the business plan.
• Enhancing our first-generation Data Processing Pipeline and Data Platform to a be ready for increased data flow from a full constellation, handling increased volkume of customer orders, while increasing robustness of processing and increasing automation of workflows. This includes among other developments, the creation of a scalable End User Platform for external and internal customer order management, as well as implementation of the STAC framework standard to enable heterogenious data sources, managing data access and API design, enabling quality control and validation as well as traceability along the processing chain.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The constellr microsatellite constellation delivers reliable, high resolution, daily land surface temperature measurements of agricultural fields across the globe. This type of data has not been available yet. Existing satellites have limitations on either revisit (approximately 10 days) or resolution (between 70m to 1km). Hence, while the potential of land-surface-temperature is widely acknoledged in research literature, due to the unavailability of the data in the needed temporal and spatial resolution, most end-users have refrained from using the data thus far for a range of application with immense potential to optimize resource usage in key industries such as agriculture. constellr engaged with the geoanalytics and agritech community to ensure the potential of our data is widely understood prior to satellite launch. constellr has among others signed agreements with the EU Copernicus Mission, the German DLR and the French Space Agency to provide access to its data for new or existing Copernicus Services, as well as the research community to further explore the potantial of thermal data.

This image offers a local view of thermal variation on our home city of Freiburg

A selection of L2 processed images over two key validation sites