After wind strom derecho went through the Midwest in August, NASA is asking for some help from the farmers that were impacted. The storm destroyed over 6 million crop acres and fifty-seven million bushels of crop storage. NASA is trying to use their satellite imagery to dive deeper into how the damage relates to yield damage. The survery that’s being given to the farmers is from NASA Harvest with a goal of using the satellite technology for practical use, especially in agriculture.
NASA Harvest wants to help figure out all of the damage that was caused by the strom and also use data from the farmers to help progress the way that satellites can estimate crop damage. A spokesperson for NASA Harvest said that they can tell if corn’s laying flat because it looks different than corn standing upright. They also know when crops are suffering drought damage because it looks different from healthy corn. They can tell all of this from satellite images. “We need the data from the ground to be able to know what those signals look like and then to map how those impacts are distibuted across larger areas, using the satellite data,” Dr. Hannah Kerner, the U.S. lead for NASA Harvest said.
