REDCEMS

With the development of international trade exchanges, crop information acquired early during the growing season become an important issue in the definition of the agro-business market strategies. In the sugar refineries for instance, crop acreage are estimated thanks to the amount of sugar beet seeds sold at a regional level. In many European countries, the cattle food factories determine the amount of food to be produced according to information provided by local agricultural newspapers and by the USDA reports.

While earth observation data are likely to improve the prediction accuracy, they are actually hardly used. Various experiments using optical data have been completed but the unreliability of data availability was found as a major constraint. SAR technology overcomes this data acquisition issue and will play a key role in this field providing well-defined objectives and a relevant interpretation methodology

The REDCEMS project intended to define the guidelines for the operational production of regional crop information based on SAR time-series analysis.

The SAR time series processing chain output consisted in the determination of the date of a phenological stage called stock-closing and which corresponds to the period at which the soil is completely hidden by the crop canopy. This phenological stage is a good indicator of the advancement of the crop growth in both the maize and sugar beet cases considered in this project.