Developing better agricultural monitoring capabilities based on Earth Observation data is critical for strengthening food production information and market transparency. The Sentinel-2 mission has the optimal capacity for regional to global agriculture monitoring in terms of resolution (10–20 meter), revisit frequency (five days) and coverage (global). In this context, the European Space Agency launched in 2014 the “Sentinel­2 for Agriculture” project, which aims to prepare the exploitation of Sentinel-2 data for agriculture monitoring through the development of open source processing chains for relevant products. The project generated an unprecedented data set, made of “Sentinel-2 like” time series and in situ data acquired in 2013 over 12 globally distributed sites. Earth Observation time series were mostly built on the SPOT4 (Take 5) data set, which was specifically designed to simulate Sentinel-2. They also included Landsat 8 and RapidEye imagery as complementary data sources. Images were pre-processed to Level 2A and the quality of the resulting time series was assessed. In situ data about cropland, crop type and biophysical variables were shared by site managers, most of them belonging to the “Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring” network. This data set allowed testing and comparing across sites the methodologies that will be at the core of the future “Sentinel­2 for Agriculture” system.

Snow cover dynamics play an important role in the hydrological characteristics of Upper Indus Basin (UIB) of Pakistan in terms of seasonal accumulation and depletions. The current study has...

Assessment of geomorphic stages of catchment areas within Upper Indus Basin (UIB) is carried out through analysis of hypsometry. Hypsometric curves were extracted for each sub-basin from Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Parameters of the Hypsometric Integral (HI), statistical moments like skewness, kurtosis, density skewness and density kurtosis of the curves were also analyzed. Study concluded that UIB is comprised of sub-basins of differential characteristics i.e. young, moderate and well developed. There is a correlation of 0.76 between the basin size and the HI. None of the basins appear to be in Monadnock Stage. The topographic analyses of slope, aspect and percentage snow-cover and land cover classes also validate the high erosion potential of upper reaches of Indus basin.