Use of Satellite Imagery to Predict Corn Phenology at a Regional Scale

Abstract

Introduction During the crop-growing season, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) via its agency, National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) releases a weekly report concerning the Crop Progress and Report Conditions (CPRC), providing an estimate of the crop phenology and overall condition of selected crops in major producing states. Phenology crop progress estimates are based on survey data collected each week from an extensive network of regional Agricultural Agents based on their field observations. Although this is a useful source of information, this task is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and biased on the data collection. In addition, in some regions of the USDA-NASS CPRC are released after the crop is planted, decreasing the prediction power of estimating planting and emergence evolution of the crop. Therefore, in order to improve the overall prediction of crop phenology and to solve potential issues related to data bias and missing information, utilization of satellite imagery can play a key role on this work (Figure 1).