Welcome to a new edition of ‘Last Week in Earth Observation’, containing a summary of major developments in EO from the last week and some exclusive analysis and insights from TerraWatch.
Four Curated Things
Major developments in EO from the past week
💰 Contractual Stuff: Funding, Contracts and Deals
Funding
- Hula.Earth, a German startup developing an EO-based biodiversity monitoring platform, raised €1.6M in a pre-seed round;
- Atlas.co, a Norway-based startup that aims to build a web-based mapping tool for geospatial data, has raised $2M in pre-seed funding;
- Horizon Technology Finance has provided $10M in venture loan to EO analytics firm Ursa Space Systems;
- Global Methane Hub, a non-profit focused on curbing emissions announced $10M in funding for Carbon Mapper and MethaneSAT’s methane emissions tracking initiative.
Contracts
- ESA signed six contracts with Greek EO solution providers to distribute and process data from their national EO constellation;
- Swiss remote sensing instrument supplier ABB was selected to develop and build the thermal infrared payloads for ESA's Harmony mission;
- Planet signed a contract expansion with Abelio, a French technology company offering smart farming solutions.
M&A
- Komunidad, a Singapore-based climate intelligence platform, has acquired Databourg, a Luxembourg-based leader in weather analytics.
- Spire has sold its maritime business to Kpler, an analytics firm that uses EO data to build trade intelligence solutions for the maritime and energy markets.
My take: It makes a lot of strategic sense for Spire as its growth in mainly in two directions: i) selling assets i.e. the satellites through the space-as-a-service offering and ii) selling the data from the satellites (mainly weather i.e. GNSS-RO), but also AIS, RF and GNSS-R).
Personally, I hope Spire will double down on weather, not just on the satellite front, but also on the modelling and forecasting. We need more weather enterprises, especially those with proprietary data, for advancing weather forecasts, in the age of AI.
📈 Strategic Stuff: Partnerships and Announcements
Announcements
- Microsoft has announced Earth Copilot, an AI-based tool in collaboration with NASA to search, discover, and analyse satellite imagery.
Partnerships
- GHGSat announced a partnership with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, MUFG Bank, and Satellite Data Service Corporation, to visualise GHG emissions and absorption using satellite data.
🗞️ Interesting Stuff: More News
- A report from the International Chamber of Commerce has estimated that extreme weather has cost $2 trillion globally over the past decade;
- Global CO2 emissions will reach a new high in 2024 despite slower growth, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project;
- Archaeologists have identified a centuries-old battle site in Iraq using declassified spy satellite images (which had a resolution of 0.8m);
- The head of the US National Reconnaissance Office said: "You can’t hide from our new swarm of SpaceX-built spy satellites;"
- An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites, GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites found evidence that Earth's total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since.
🔗 Click-Worthy Stuff: Check These Out
- This piece that describes how satellite images were used to reveal massive crop losses in war-torn Ukraine;
- This piece that investigates how oil and gas companies disguise their methane emissions to avoid being identified by satellites;
- This article that digs into how AI weather models have shown promise this hurricane season.
EO Summit 2025: Call for Sponsors
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Participating Sponsors
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One Discussion Point
Exclusive analysis and insights from TerraWatch
Earth Observation for Wildfire Monitoring
Wildfires have existed for as long as plant life has existed on Earth. Not all fires are destructive—wildfires help clear nutrients in the soil and open access to sunlight while killing certain problematic insects and diseases. Some tree and plant species even depend on the heat from a fire to open up their seeds. This is why fire experts and land managers set fires to existing ecosystems under specified weather conditions to restore health to ecosystems that depend on the fire.
But when they get out of control, wildfires can become dangerous - costing the US economy between $394 billion and $893 billion annually, beyond immediate wildfire damage, including impacts to real estate value, premature deaths, and health risks from wildfire smoke, threats to watersheds; and income loss.
Wildfires develop where there is available combustible vegetation and an ignition source, such as from lightning strikes or human activity, accidental or intentional. While roughly four out of five wildfires are started by people (varies by country), dry weather, droughts, and strong winds - all impacted by climate change - transform a spark of fire into wildfires consuming tens of thousands of acres.
The Fire Behaviour Triangle
Wildfires represent a complex, multiscale problem—a confluence of biological, meteorological, physical, and social factors influencing their likelihood, behaviour, duration, extent, and outcome. As a result, the observational infrastructure also requires a multimodal solution, from connected sensors and cameras on the ground to satellites in multiple orbits.
But what do we really observe when we use EO to monitor wildfires?
The "fire behaviour triangle" provides a framework for identifying the key variables that affect how a wildfire behaves.
Fuel is anything that burns, including both live and dead vegetation, from plants and trees to leaves and saplings. Weather indicators and topographic conditions affect how fast fires spread.
These three variables determine a fire's behaviour - speed, direction, and flame characteristics and intensity, which can be classified into 14 indicators.
Check out the full deep dive to learn more about these indicators, how satellites are used to track them, and the market for EO for wildfire monitoring.
Scene from Space
One visual leveraging EO
A New Era of Methane Emissions Monitoring
A couple of recently launched methane emission monitoring satellites - MethaneSat from Environmental Defense Fund and Tanager-1 from Planet/Carbon Mapper - have released new images that demonstrate their power in detecting, quantifying and contextualising methane emissions from both wide areas and specific landfills sites.
Until next time,
Aravind.
