Visualizing Drought Conditions in the Iberian Peninsula
How to use the Planet OS API and NASA soil moisture data to visualize drought conditions during the recent wildfires in Portugal and Spain.
We built Planet OS Datahub enabling simplified programmatic access to high-quality Earth Data (weather, climate, and environmental data) so that people could build great data-driven applications with less hassle. We routinely add new datasets to Planet OS Datahub based on the feedback we receive from our users.
This week we added two environmental datasets where the data is retrieved from satellite sensors:
SMAP dataset provides soil moisture data that is used for drought monitoring, flood prediction, weather forecasting as well as linking water, energy and carbon cycles. For example, in my Jupyter notebook below I used SMAP data to show that the drought in Spain and Portugal was so severe that the dryness was comparable with African deserts. Soil moisture is also critical for healthy plant growth and helps to improve crop yield forecasts and irrigation planning around the world.
MODIS dataset provides consistent spatial and temporal comparisons of vegetation conditions. It provides variables like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI). NDVI and EVI complement each other and are widely used in global vegetation studies to improve upon the detection of vegetation changes and extraction of canopy biophysical parameters. They are also often used in agriculture.
You can access these and other high-quality environmental datasets for free using the Planet OS Datahub API.
Visualizing Soil Moisture in Portugal & Spain
As mentioned above, I’ve published a Jupyter notebook in GitHub showing the severe drought in the Iberian peninsula. In my notebook you will learn how to download data using the Planet OS Package API, which provides access to large gridded datasets in less time than a traditional raster API. In addition, you’ll learn how to visualize the soil moisture data and extract different information from it.
We routinely add new datasets to Planet OS Datahub. If you’d like to be notified when new data becomes available, follow Planet OS on Medium or subscribe to our email newsletter to receive future updates in your inbox.
