Satellites are a critical Earth observation tool as they facilitate the remote monitoring of Earth’s climate and environmental patterns, especially for areas that are physically inaccessible. With this information, scientists can closely monitor the indicators of crop health and identify possible early warnings of declining crop conditions.

Displaying climate, environmental, and vegetative variables that impact agricultural outcomes, the AGMET Indicators were born from an agricultural stakeholder-identified need for a simpler way to visualize and monitor crop health throughout the growing season, and with the ultimate goal of identifying potential cropping concerns early on in the season before a food shortage disaster actually materializes. One of the many benefits of agricultural monitoring during the growing season using satellite data is that we can efficiently keep track of how well food production is shaping up compared to previous years. This allows farmers, economists, policymakers, humanitarian agencies, and other agricultural players around the world to more sufficiently plan, ensuring communities do not go hungry and that food markets remain stable.

The AGMET Indicators use satellite data to help the agricultural community monitor crop production as it’s happening and enable mitigation measures to be taken early on as problematic conditions are developing. In order to simplify the complicated interconnected nature of agricultural monitoring data each AGMET Indicator is composed of quantitative plots for: NDVI, recent NDVI 5-year comparisons, evaporative stress index, cumulative precipitation (versus the 5 year mean), daily precipitation, surface soil moisture, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature that are processed over the agricultural baseline datasets from the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor including crop calendars and crop masks.In this way, the AGMET Indicators take the data processing burden off of crop analysts and provide a quick, effective, and easily-digestible means of interpreting massive amounts of global satellite data on croplands as the season progresses.

Additionally, the AGMET Indicators are being produced for each country covered in the GEOGLAM Crop Monitors, which together comprise over 90% of the world’s croplands. Within each country, the AGMET Indicator plots are available for two different regional breakdowns: Admin Level 1 and Crop Monitor regions. The Admin Level 1 regions include the administrative boundaries of the first sub-national level while the Crop Monitor regions include an aggregation admin level 1 or sub-admin level 1 units that share similar agro-climatic growing conditions for crops.

Already, the AGMET graphics are being used to support operational monitoring and are frequently implemented as key evidence in several international reports, including the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor monthly bulletins, Crop Monitor Special Reports featuring areas of developing concern, and in country updates from the FAO Global Information and Early Warning System on Food and Agriculture (GIEWS). To explore the online AGMET Indicators tool, visit https://cropmonitor.org/tools/agmet/.