Inside the field polygon, week by week
The field indices come off a 10 m optical constellation and a radar constellation, both averaged inside the polygon drawn on the field. Optical scenes are cloud-masked and combined over a 15-day window, so a cloudy fortnight still produces a value; radar backscatter and the radar vegetation index don’t notice cloud at all. The run is weekly. The same optical product also feeds the county-level demand indices, just averaged over an administrative unit’s cropland instead of 1 field. A 2-hectare field holds about 200 optical pixels, enough for a stable weekly mean.
What sits under the field
The soil baseline is read once per location from open soil maps rather than measured on site. It keeps 9 physical layers: sand, silt and clay with the derived texture class, stones, bulk density, bedrock depth, elevation and slope, plus field capacity, wilting point, saturation and available water at 5 depths. Left out on purpose are modelled nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, organic carbon and pH, a 2016 snapshot of exactly the properties that farming changes every season. Nutrients and pH on this platform come only from a soil test the farmer had done.
Decades of climate before the station has any of its own
The climate archive backfills each station’s coordinates with daily reanalysis reaching to 1940 and daily rainfall reaching to 1981, then tops itself up weekly from there. A station installed this morning already carries 86 years of local temperature and 45 years of local rainfall by the afternoon, which is exactly what lets an anomaly advisory run before the station has earned a season of its own.