- Acclimate by Solvecast
- Posts
- 🗺 #005 — Earth Observation
🗺 #005 — Earth Observation
Earth observation consists of using satellite imagery to capture and disseminate climate-focused data that can be used to build climate analytics, insights, and applications.
Hi friends,
Welcome to this week’s deep dive. This week, we’re exploring Earth Observation.
For the last 50+ years, satellites have been used to explore outer space. But climate change is causing us to point satellites back toward Earth to better understand our changing planet.
Earth observation data has a variety of use cases including agriculture, insurance, commercial real estate, and wildfire management.
📣 TLDR
There are 54 groups of climate variables across land, air, and sea, defined by the Global Climate Observing System.
Earth observation consists of using satellite imagery to capture and disseminate climate-focused data that can be used to build climate analytics, insights, and applications.
😬 Problem
Knowing how to mitigate and adapt business operations to the consequences of climate change is hard.
🎯 Solution
Satellite imagery captures high-resolution images of the planet from space, which can be used to track changes in the environment, forecast weather patterns, and study the effects of human activity on the planet.
💪🏼 Innovators
Data & Platforms
HydroSat provides geospatial intelligence for food security, critical infrastructure, and the environment.
Tomorrow is a weather intelligence platform that provides real-time weather forecasts.
Planet is an aerospace and data analytics company that builds small satellites and delivers information about the changing planet.
Satellogic will democratize access to space-based services by dramatically reducing the barriers to obtain real-time satellite data.
BlackSky is a leading provider of real-time geospatial intelligence with multimodal imagery, analytics, and strategic insights
Insights & Analytics
Blue Sky Analytics is a geospatial data intelligence startup building environmental monitoring and climate risk assessment products.
AtlasAI is an analytics platform that guides the deployment of investment and other resource allocation decisions in the emerging markets.
SkyWatch provides a digital infrastructure for the distribution of Earth observation data and derived intelligence.
Applications
Betterview is a data and risk analytics platform for property insurers.
Climate X delivers climate risk-related ratings and asset level financial impacts for extreme weather events linked to climate change.
Satelligence specializes in remote sensing, natural resource management, and tracking deforestation with satellite data analytics for sustainability and ESG reporting.
Overstory applies artificial intelligence to high-resolution satellite imagery to provide real-time analytics of natural resources.
SustGlobal transforms complex climate science into transparent financial signals.
Sylvera develops machine learning-based tools to track the performance of carbon offsets.
ClimateView helps cities transform climate planning into progress.
Watershed helps measure, report, and act on your carbon footprint while driving reductions at scale across the supply chain.
⚡️ Opportunities
Climate data is complex. Focus on providing analytics and insights for specific verticals.
Regrow Ag combines agronomy and scenario planning with monitoring, reporting, and verification for agriculture.
PlanetWatchers is a geospatial intelligence and enterprise natural resource monitoring service for agriculture.
Pachama is an AI-powered marketplace for nature carbon removal credits.
Zesty.ai is an AI-enabled property analytics and risk platform for insurance.
Provide analytics and insights to solve a specific problem.
Cloud to Street is a satellite and AI platform to track floods in near real-time anywhere on earth.
Vibrant Planet is a cloud-based technology platform that accelerates and improves collaborative forest restoration planning and monitoring.
OroraTech provides wildfire detection and monitoring from space.
Measure asset-level climate risk
Cervest is cloud-based provider of AI-powered Climate Intelligence that helps organizations manage and adapt to asset-level risk globally.
Jupiter Intelligence predicts risks of natural perils from severe weather and climate change on physical assets.
⚠️ Challenges
Launching satellites is both a technical and business challenge.
It’s capital intensive, hard to differentiate, and doesn’t lend itself to the easily fundable recurring revenue business model.
Fortunately, using satellites to monitor earth is not new. NASA and other scientific organizations have been monitoring Earth from space for 50+ years.
There is a lot of publicly available data that can be acquired, disseminated, and turned into intelligence for customers for apps focused on emissions, weather, wildfires.
Real-time geospatial data can be very expensive to acquire, depending on how frequent the objects change.
But that can be supplemented with drones and IoT sensors.
Scanifly provides drone-based solar design software.
😈 Devil’s Advocate
“We only have ~50 years of earth data, so we can’t accurately predict how it will change.”
We’ve been using satellite imagery to forecast weather for years. It’s not perfect, but helps mitigate and adapt.
“Use cases for earth observation in climate have unproven business models”
It’s an emerging space (no pun intended). There is risk but also other applications across weather forecasting, military, and refugee support.
🚀 Takeaways
Satellite imagery is being used to understand how changes in the environment, weather patterns, and human activity impact the planet.
Verticalization and problem-specific climate data, analytics, and insight solutions and applications have the highest probability of success.
Managing spacecrafts is hard, but there is plenty of public or acquirable data from existing satellite providers.