INSIGHTS / FIELD NOTES
Practical explanations of what satellite observations can reveal, where their limits lie and how to ask better questions.
An optical satellite may revisit a region while clouds obscure the ground. Delivery cadence must reflect usable imagery, not just the orbit schedule. A useful monitoring plan screens quality, considers seasonal weather and makes observation gaps visible.
Read about Landsat acquisition ↗Regional land-cover patterns and an individual construction feature require different levels of detail. Sentinel-2 provides bands at 10, 20 and 60 metre resolution. Finer-looking resampling does not create new ground detail. Source suitability should be established before promising feature-level analysis.
Explore Sentinel-2 ↗A changed pixel may reflect vegetation seasonality, water level, shadows, cloud contamination or real construction. Aligning images and comparing several dates helps separate candidate events from noise. Domain expertise and ground verification determine what a flagged change actually means.
Define the region, the question, the relevant time period and the action an insight could support. Then evaluate available observations against those requirements. Agree a baseline, review sample outputs and document the limitations before scaling to a portfolio.