Newsletter · · 6 min read

Last Week in Earth Observation: November 5, 2024

Strategic Dilemmas in Earth Observation, Chemical Deforestation and Measuring Drought with Gravity

Welcome to a new, belated 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

Contracts

📈 Strategic Stuff: Partnerships and Announcements

Announcements

Partnerships

🗞️ Interesting Stuff: More News

🔗 Click-Worthy Stuff: Check These Out

Credit: New York Times / Planet

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One Discussion Point

Exclusive analysis and insights from TerraWatch


5. Strategic Dilemmas in the Earth Observation Market

Here are some of my thoughts on the big strategic dilemmas in EO, based on my experience working in the industry for the past several years. I have categorised them based on the three categories of stakeholders in EO.

  1. EO Data Providers: To vertically integrate or not? To verticalise or not?
  2. EO Analytics Firms: To ‘productise’ the project or ‘projectise’ the product?
  3. End-users of EO: In-house EO vs outsourced EO vs off-the-shelf EO product?

EO Data Providers

These companies are in the "Data" layer of the EO value chain. And they have two important choices to make:

EO Analytics Firms

These companies operate in the "Insights" and "Application" layers of the EO value chain. They need to decide:

End-users of EO

The end-users of EO, who come from several sectors such as agriculture, insurance, finance, infrastructure, mining, etc. have some tough choices to make:

These are learnings gathered through over 50 strategic assignments with EO data providers, EO analytics firms, and end-users of EO. If you are thinking through these questions in your organisation and need an external assessment of your strategy, I am happy to help.

Scene from Space

One visual leveraging EO


Record Droughts and Deadly Floods

October 2024 saw some river basins, lakes, and reservoirs fall to record-low levels in parts of South America, including Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. The drought contributed to historic wildfires across the continent, with the lack of rainfall and low soil moisture amplifying the fires and causing them to spread faster and farther (even visible from space).

The image below shows shallow groundwater storage in October as measured by NASA's GRACE-FO satellites (possibly my favourite satellite mission of all time)—blue areas have more water than usual, and orange and red areas have less.

How does it work? The GRACE-FO mission detects changes in the Earth's gravity field. Since changes in the amount of water stored in a region can cause changes in the gravity, the satellite is able measure these changes 🤯

Credit: NASA

In the meantime, Spain suffered one of its worst flooding events in decades after heavy rains struck the region of Valencia, dropping a year’s worth of rain in just eight hours. This has led to catastrophic floods and over 200 casualties.

The image below, processed by ESA using images from NASA's Landsat mission, shows the level of flooding in the region.

Credit: ESA

Until next time,

Aravind.

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