Another year delivering 100% success rate to the European Commission’s CwRS Programme for European Space Imaging
- European Space Imaging
Despite the challenges incurred from COVID-19 in 2020, European Space Imaging has once again finalised the collection of Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite imagery for the European Commission as part of their Controls with Remote Sensing (CwRS) programme.
Acquiring a total of 361,991 square kilometres, this is the fourth year in a row that the company has proficiently completed the collection with a success rate of 100% further enhancing the company’s reputation for reliability as Europe’s leading VHR satellite imagery provider.
“Given the unanticipated circumstances that we faced in 2020, we are extremely proud to once again deliver a success rate of 100% for this important and often demanding project,” said Adrian Zevenbergen, European Space Imaging’s Managing Director. “Our staff worked tirelessly to adapt to the new workflows required to battle the pandemic whilst also ensuring our customer’s projects were not adversely affected. Their dedication to this campaign is evident by this project’s outcome.”
The CwRS programme monitors agricultural land for which farmers have been granted subsidies under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), amounting to approximately €40 billion per year. European Space Imaging has been the major provider of Very High Resolution satellite data to the programme since 2003.
European Space Imaging had 676 acquisition windows for each of the 609 agricultural zones spread all over Europe using the WorldView-2, WorldView-3 and GeoEye-1 sensors. In addition, they also utilized their partnership with SI Imaging Services to provide imagery from Kompsat-3 and Kompsat-3A.
“This year we again saw the same weather challenges over Ireland and the UK as previous years. Despite this we were able to collect almost the entire coverage area zones with less than 10% cloud cover, close to 41% of this was completely cloud-free” said Dr. Melanie Rankl, Project Manager at European Space Imaging. “The added advantage of operating our own ground station ensured that the imagery was delivered in near-real time; an enormous benefit to the EU Member States in managing their deadlines”.
From its ground station in Munich, European Space Imaging takes into account real-time weather conditions before directly tasking the world’s most advanced satellite constellation: WorldView-1, GeoEye-1, WorldView-2 and WorldView-3. Direct tasking allows the company to minimise cloud cover, increase collection efficiency, enable customer flexibility and shorten delivery times.
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