Meditations
Explore posts from the Descartes Labs team.
May 9, 2023 · 3 min read
Fast and interactive deployment of computer vision models with the Descartes Labs platform
Leveraging satellite imagery for machine learning computer vision applications has come a long way. Here, we discuss and illustrate the fundamentals and applications using the Descartes Labs platform including three video examples.
Apr 5, 2023 · 2 min read
Descartes Labs Partners with Comtech as New EVOKE Technology Member
MELVILLE, N.Y – Apr. 5, 2023 – Descartes Labs announced today that they will become Comtech’s (NASDAQ: CMTL) third publicly revealed EVOKE technology partner.
Feb 28, 2023 · 3 min read
Commodity Procurement: Manage your feed costs using Descartes Labs Grains & Feeds package
2021 & 2022 brought their share of challenges to ranchers, hogs and poultry producers. The whole animal protein production was confronted by higher costs along the supply chain, swings in consumption from the ups & downs of the pandemic and from disease pressure.
Nov 29, 2022 · 4 min read
Descartes Labs Goes All-in on AWS to Help Organizations Harness Geospatial Data to Address Sustainability, Food Security, and Climate Change
Leading geospatial intelligence company relies on AWS infrastructure, high performance computing, and analytics to give customers timely, actionable insights to expand their geospatial data applications
Nov 8, 2022 · 3 min read
Risk Management: Improve your input costs using Descartes Labs Vegetable Oils package
In summer 2022, the price of the soybean oil contract on CME reached an all-time high, with the Jan-2023 contract almost touching the 80 cts/lb mark. Under such inflationary pressures, input costs from soybean oil and other vegetable oils have almost doubled when compared to 2020. These past months, using the insights and recommendations from the Descartes Labs Vegetable Oils package helped our customers' procurement managers to reduce their input costs under those rapidly changing macroeconomic conditions.
Sep 21, 2022 · 4 min read
Sentinel-1 Technical Series Part 5 | Targeted analysis
This is Part 5 of a technical series focusing on Descartes Labs’ global SAR processing capabilities. SAR provides a valuable remote sensing tool, and this series will dive into detail about how we...
Sep 15, 2022 · 5 min read
SAR Technical Series Part 4 | Sentinel-1 global velocity layer: Using global InSAR at scale
This is Part 4 of a technical series focusing on Descartes Labs’ global SAR processing capabilities. SAR provides a valuable remote sensing tool, and this series will dive into detail about how we...
Sep 8, 2022 · 4 min read
Sentinel-1 Technical Series Part 3 | Global scale InSAR
This is Part 3 of a technical series focusing on Descartes Labs’ global SAR processing capabilities. SAR provides a valuable remote sensing tool, and this series will dive into detail about how we...
Aug 31, 2022 · 7 min read
Sentinel-1 Technical Series Part 2 | SAR Geocoding: Working with SAR and InSAR data in geospatial frameworks
This is Part 2 of a technical series focusing on Descartes Labs’ global SAR processing capabilities. SAR provides a valuable remote sensing tool, and this series will dive into detail about how we...
Aug 25, 2022 · 5 min read
Sentinel-1 Technical Series Part 1 | Burst Mapping: Random Seeks into PB Scale Non Cloud-Optimized Data Archives
Welcome to Part 1 of a technical series focusing on Descartes Labs’ global SAR processing capabilities. SAR provides a valuable remote sensing tool, and this series will dive into detail about how we...
Aug 23, 2022 · 6 min read
Sentinel-1 at Descartes Labs: An Overview
Welcome to the first post in a technical series highlighting the capabilities at Descartes Labs (DL) for processing Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. SAR provides a valuable remote...
Jul 21, 2022 · 1 min read
Workshop Highlights: Leveraging Sentinel-1 for Agricultural Insights
Learn how SAR and InSAR data are applied for agricultural use cases.
Jun 14, 2022 · 2 min read
DigiFarm: Field Boundaries for Precise In-Season Analytics
Accurate field boundary data can help the estimated 570 million farmers and growers worldwide boost their yields and lower their input costs.
May 23, 2022 · 3 min read
Unlocking Climate and Sustainability Action with Remote Sensing
Descartes Labs' Applied Scientist Rose Rustowicz shares insights with members of The Sustainability Consortium at TSC Summit 2022
May 10, 2022 · 6 min read
How We Mapped the World's Solar Power Plants
A first-of-its-kind global inventory of photovoltaic solar facilities built using satellite imagery and machine learning.
Apr 5, 2022 · 3 min read
Announcing Packaged Analytics for Four New Commodities
Price forecasts, market insights, and purchasing recommendations for London Cocoa, Coffee Arabica, Corn, and Soybean Oil.
Mar 16, 2022 · 3 min read
Educational Series (part two): Types of Spatial Data and Coordinate Systems
The basics of understanding raster data, vector data, and coordinate systems.
Feb 28, 2022 · 2 min read
ClearSky: A Cloud-Free View of the Planet
Predicting full-spectrum optical and infrared imagery from SAR alone with Aspia Space
Feb 3, 2022 · 6 min read
Educational Series (part one): A Look into the Fundamentals of Remote Sensing
The basics of understanding remote sensing, related terminology, and use case examples.
Jan 10, 2022 · 5 min read
Annotating Imagery at Scale with GeoVisual Search
How to Go From Zero Data to Thousands of Annotated Satellite Images
Jan 5, 2022 · 2 min read
High-Resolution Satellogic Imagery Now Available Through the Descartes Labs Platform
Today, we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Satellogic that brings sub-meter, high-frequency satellite imagery to the Descartes Labs Platform. With 17 satellites and counting, Satellogic...
Dec 9, 2021 · 6 min read
Leveraging Geospatial Imaging and Data to Track Deforestation and Biodiversity Loss
Presented during the AllianceBernstein ESG Conference on Biodiversity: Turning earth observations into supply chain analytics.
Nov 18, 2021 · 1 min read
A Smart Way to Pay for Sustainability Initiatives
The same geospatial data that anticipates and mitigates price fluctuations can protect and enhance your environmental reputation.
Sep 8, 2021 · 3 min read
Calculating Mill Level Deforestation & Carbon Risk Scores Across the Palm Supply Chain
Illustrating the power of the Descartes Labs Platform to explore agricultural traceability challenges
Aug 16, 2021 · 5 min read
Connected for Good: Fireside Chat with Terry Cunningham, CEO at Descartes Labs, and Bish Sen, EVP of Supply Chain at Unilever
Tackling the Pressing Challenge of Deforestation to Help Build a More Sustainable Future Terry Cunningham, President and CEO of Descartes Labs, and Bish Sen, Executive Vice President of Supply Chain...
Aug 9, 2021 · 2 min read
The Role of Remote Sensing in Scaling Regenerative Agriculture
Scaling regenerative agriculture is possible with remote sensing through a data-driven experience for the farmer and the buyer.
Jun 28, 2021 · 4 min read
Descartes Labs Achieves #40 in TOP500 with Cloud-based Supercomputing Demonstration Powered by AWS, Signaling New Era for Geospatial Data Analysis at Scale
Descartes Labs uses Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to run a 9.95 petaflops High-Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark, placing it #40 in the June 2021 TOP500 ranking. The company improves on its previous AWS-based 2019 TOP500 submission (1.926 petaflops, #136) by 417% in HPL performance and 96 ranking spots in only two years.
Jun 24, 2021 · 5 min read
Quantifying the Intuitive: How Geospatial Data Helps Forecast Commodity Prices
Vaccine rollouts and sluggish supply chains still facing pandemic-related restrictions drove increased demand in the first half of 2021 for basic commodities like soybeans, sugar, vegetable oils, meat, and dairy.
Feb 24, 2021 · 4 min read
Planetary Scale Intelligence for the Mining Super Cycle
Sentinel-2 false color image of an area near Death Valley National Park, CA. Enhancing mineral prospecting and tailings safety with massively scalable models of the earth “Covid is ushering in a new...
Sep 9, 2020 · 5 min read
Gaze into the Future with Downscaled Climate Models
The combination of global climate models and land cover data can be used to estimate the regional effects of climate change years into the future By Sepideh Khajehei — Sepideh is an Applied Scientist...
Aug 26, 2020 · 5 min read
Seeing Through the Clouds
Predicting Vegetation Indices Using Radar Imagery By Terry Conlon — Ph.D. Student in the Sustainable Engineering Lab at Columbia University. Terry completed the following work as a Descartes Labs...
Aug 17, 2020 · 4 min read
How I Trained a GAN to Make It Snow
Non-snowy summertime imagery at left compared to synthetic snowy imagery over the same location at right. Generating realistic but synthetic images to test automated change detection algorithms By...
Jul 8, 2020 · 7 min read
Getting Back to Work with Economic Activity Signals
A three month Sentinel-1 SAR composite over Singapore with lighter colors capturing economic activity on land and at sea. Descartes Labs Economic Activity Signals uses multimodal remotely sensed data...
Apr 15, 2020 · 3 min read
Apply for Our Impact Science Program and Get Your Hands on the World’s Data
Descartes Labs opens up our second round of applications for free platform API access to individuals and small research teams The Donjek Glacier has temporarily dammed the Donjek River multiple times...
Mar 30, 2020 · 2 min read
Putting our Wildfire Detector to Work in New Mexico
The State Forestry Department will use our automated detector during the 2020 wildfire season In 2018, approximately 360,500 acres burned across our headquarters’ state of New Mexico. After a winter...
Mar 19, 2020 · 6 min read
COVID-19: The Road to Economic and Social Recovery
We will recover, but how will we know when? Updated with aggregated mobility data from Friday, June 5th, 2020 Review our aggregated mobility tracking methodology in our technical paper: Mobility...
Jan 22, 2020 · 3 min read
The Descartes Labs Platform
Geospatial data and modeling tools in one package At Descartes Labs, we’ve been working at scale for years to solve some of the world’s hardest and most important geospatial AI challenges. Our custom...
Jan 6, 2020 · 4 min read
Geospatial Data’s Next Frontier: Building Operational Forecasts in the Cloud
Creating statistical models of reservoir storage and hydropower generation using the Descartes Labs Platform Written by Julio E. Herrera Estrada, PhD
Nov 28, 2019 · 4 min read
How We Built a Machine Learning Model to Locate and Map Cranberry Bogs for National Geographic
For a fun piece to chew on during the Thanksgiving holiday, National Geographic asked Descartes Labs if we could figure out a way to map every cranberry bog in the United States. We had less than a...
Nov 26, 2019 · 4 min read
The Satellites Hunting for Megafires
Descartes Labs has built an operational wildfire detector using satellite imagery which enabled the Los Angeles Times to release the first public report of the Kincade Fire.
Oct 23, 2019 · 4 min read
Scaling Spatial Analysis with The Trust for Public Land
Cities across the northeast regularly experience warmer temperatures than rural areas in this MODIS land surface temperature visualization by Descartes Labs. The Descartes Labs Platform supercharges...
Oct 11, 2019 · 2 min read
Descartes Labs Raises $20 Million to Accelerate Our Mission and Welcomes Phil Fraher as CFO
There’s never a dull moment over here at Descartes Labs. Between hosting the 2030 Governor’s Energy and Environmental Technology Summit with Governor Lujan Grisham, building our new methane...
Oct 1, 2019 · 3 min read
Sep 19, 2019 · 4 min read
Monitoring Methane in Our Home State — A Bold New Plan for New Mexico
Today we’re excited to announce that Descartes Labs will create mapping and modeling capabilities to monitor methane emissions in New Mexico, starting in the Permian Basin. This announcement is not...
Sep 12, 2019 · 4 min read
Sharpening The Focus on Methane Emissions
The European Space Agency’s launch of the Sentinel-5P satellite in October of 2017 ushered in a new era of atmospheric monitoring from space. The instrument provides near-daily global measurements of...
Sep 11, 2019 · 1 min read
Accelerating Research with the Impact Science Program
Descartes Labs applied scientist Dr. Kyle Story demonstrating the programmatic power of the Python API Descartes Labs aims to improve science around the world with free Platform API access for...
Sep 9, 2019 · 5 min read
Blurry no more?! Using Deep Learning to Harmonize Satellite Imagery Across Resolutions
If you’ve ever gone online to find your favorite spot on a map and, upon zooming in, you were left disappointed because the images were blurry, pixelated, or otherwise not up to par, then keep...
Aug 27, 2019 · 2 min read
Iridium COO Suzi McBride joins as Descartes Labs’ newest board member
Suzi McBride, Descartes Labs newest board member We are thrilled to welcome Suzi McBride as our first independent director. Descartes Labs has an ambitious goal of understanding global natural...
Jul 22, 2019 · 3 min read
A Photo Love Letter to Santa Fe
Running after work, Lake Peak, Santa Fe National Forest, May 31, 2018 | Ryan Keisler, Applied Science 40 Snapshots of the Region Descartes Labs Calls Home If you’ve never been to the city of Santa...
Jun 26, 2019 · 6 min read
Measuring Sustainability from Space
Digital supply chain transformations require “decision-useful” data to monitor and measure environmental and societal impacts. Space-based sensors and AI-derived data models help de-risk these...
Jun 19, 2019 · 4 min read
Thunder from the Cloud: 40,000 Cores Running in Concert on AWS
Screenshot of Descartes Labs’ Linpack Benchmark score of 1.926 petaflops using publicly available cloud resources on Amazon Web Services. Descartes Labs builds one of the world’s TOP500 fastest...
Jun 5, 2019 · 3 min read
Extraordinary Views of Earth from a Frankly Wacky Satellite
Earth as a blue marble rolling around in space, made possible with unique observations by DSCOVR EPIC. In February of 2015, after years of delays (including seven that saw the project literally...
May 30, 2019 · 3 min read
Gary Lang Joins Descartes Labs to run Engineering
Descartes Labs team As Descartes Labs grows rapidly, we’re constantly adding to the executive team to support our continued success. That’s why we’re proud to announce Gary Lang, as our new Head of...
May 20, 2019 · 3 min read
Custom Kubernetes Scaling via Envoy Metrics
A selection of data products returned from our Raster service The Descartes Labs Platform runs on Kubernetes and scales from hundreds to tens of thousands of cores in response to customer traffic.
May 1, 2019 · 5 min read
Texas Reigns Supreme in U.S. Energy Production (and McCamey Shows Us How)
This eight-mile-across image of McCamey, Texas sits in a part of the state with a seemingly endless network of oil and gas infrastructure, but it also features the giant Upton 2 solar farm (which...
Apr 24, 2019 · 9 min read
Apr 17, 2019 · 2 min read
Creating Actionable Intelligence for the Oil & Gas Sector by Fusing Commercial and Proprietary Data
The probability output of a deep learning computer vision model which detects and segments well pads in the Permian Basin. Creating Actionable Intelligence for the Oil & Gas Sector by Fusing...
Mar 19, 2019 · 2 min read
Understanding the changing face of agriculture with global sensors
Fields in Vietnam At Descartes Labs, we got our start modeling agricultural yields using data from satellites. Along the way, our scientists secured multiple patents around creating field boundary...
Feb 15, 2019 · 3 min read
What We Burn Creates an Eerily Navigable Map of Earth
Nikhil Sharma at Descartes Labs created a global composite of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO₂) over August and September of 2018. Here, the highest levels of NO₂ are shown first and the rest fade in slowly....
Dec 20, 2018 · 4 min read
Nov 16, 2018 · 2 min read
If you’re looking for a data prep challenge, look no further than satellite imagery
As some of you might know, in January I joined Descartes Labs. As a company, one of our goals is to make spatial data more readily available and to make it easier to go from observations to...
Nov 1, 2018 · 2 min read
2018 Summer Internship Report
Celebrating National Intern Day on July 26th with our intern team at the Violet Crown in Santa FE We had our first summer internship program at Descartes Labs this summer, and wow, were we impressed....
Oct 23, 2018 · 2 min read
Sep 24, 2018 · 3 min read
How tech startup Descartes Labs is helping Cargill unlock the future of data
(This article has been reposted from www.cargill.com) What brought together a 153-year-old grain trader and a tech startup in an office full of bean bag chairs? Corn, naturally.
Sep 12, 2018 · 2 min read
Building a Geospatial Analytics Marketplace with DARPA
Comparison of standard optical RGB imagery (left) and SAR (right) demonstrates how data from various sensors on the Descartes Labs platform may be used to detect illegal fishing. (Source: Descartes...
Aug 15, 2018 · 3 min read
Descartes Labs Platform Emerges from Beta with First Non-Satellite Data Set and Airbus Partnership
About 15 months ago, Descartes Labs entered beta to gather feedback from customers on our progress toward developing an advanced platform for global-scale predictive analytics. Getting at that scale...
Jul 18, 2018 · 2 min read
@WildfireSignal Tracking System Now Live on Twitter
Fire over Durango, Colorado, seen in RGB on the left, and NIR on the right Our Wildfire Watch System, @WildfireSignal, went live on Twitter today. Our applied science team is experimenting with new...
Jun 14, 2018 · 4 min read
Rise of the Living Supply Chain
Synthetic Aperture Radar image of the the Port of Shanghai: the busiest port in the world and ground zero for most of the world’s supply chains Supply chain is an interesting term. What is it? It is...
May 17, 2018 · 3 min read
Measuring Volcanic Earth Displacement Using Interferometric SAR
Figure 1: An interferogram from a pair of collections made during descending passes. The fringes to the left are surface deformations centered to the east of the Kilauea summit and lava lake. The...
Apr 20, 2018 · 4 min read
Global-scale water monitoring in the cloud
The many shapes and colors of water, from a silt-laden river in Louisiana to Lake Mead, Nevada to the Great Salt Lake, Utah. All images from the Sentinel-2 satellite. Water plays many roles in our...
Oct 19, 2017 · 3 min read
Assessing the damage of California’s wildfires
Over the past week, we’ve watched in horror as wildfires tore across Northern California. With a deep data archive of satellite imagery and expertise in remote sensing, we also wondered what we could...
Sep 22, 2017 · 2 min read
Multi-dimensional Choropleth Maps using PostGIS, GeoServer, and Google Earth
A choropleth map is a “thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or...
Aug 24, 2017 · 5 min read
Announcing our $30M Series B
Today, we’re excited to announce Descartes Labs $30M Series B round of financing led by March Capital, an LA-based venture capital fund. Our seed round was led by Crosslink Capital and our Series A...
May 24, 2017 · 8 min read
Fighting Wildfires Using a Cloud-based Supercomputer
In the wake of yet another season of significant wildfire activity across the US and in particular California, our drought-weary states brace for the start of a new wildfire season that will once...
May 1, 2017 · 9 min read
Mapping the land from space (in the Cloud)
There are at the very least six separate global land cover mapping efforts. The European Space Agency (ESA) just released an unprecedented 24 annual global land cover maps as a part of the Climate...
Apr 24, 2017 · 2 min read
Descartes Labs Platform Now in Closed Beta with Los Alamos National Laboratory as an Inaugural…
Starting today, Descartes Labs is accepting applications for Beta access to the most advanced Platform for extracting information from satellite imagery on a global scale.
Apr 21, 2017 · 2 min read
Microservice Usage Logging with Openresty and Google BigQuery
Here at Descartes Labs, we have been using the microservice architecture in building out our platform. If you are unfamiliar with microservices, they are a collection of independent services often...
Mar 28, 2017 · 2 min read
Hacking Food Security from Space
Does widespread hunger caused by food shortages contribute to conditions that lead to regional instability? If potential food shortages could be detected early and humanitarian action could be taken...
Mar 7, 2017 · 3 min read
Mar 7, 2017 · 3 min read
Searching the World Wide World
Today, we’re unveiling a technology demonstration of machine learning at global scale, which we call GeoVisual Search. This release makes the global composite images we released last month a bit...
Feb 6, 2017 · 3 min read
Using Petabytes of Pixels with Python to Create 3 New Images of the Earth
Today we’re excited to share three new satellite imagery-based maps of the earth, made here at Descartes Labs. These are global composite images constructed using data from the Landsat 8,...
Sep 8, 2016 · 2 min read
Advancing the science of soy forecasting
Descartes Labs’ weekly forecast for U.S. corn and soy yields Last month, we were excited to unveil our 2016 U.S. Corn Yield Forecast. Today, we’re adding soybeans to our weekly production forecasts.
Aug 10, 2016 · 4 min read
Advancing the science of corn forecasting
Corn yields by county, updated weekly on www.descarteslabs.com Today, Descartes Labs is releasing our 2016 U.S. Corn Yield Forecast. Not only is this year’s corn model vastly improved over last...