Empowering Agricultural Sustainability with Maxar’s ClimateDesk

Agribusinesses worldwide face unprecedented challenges like shifting rainfall patterns and rising temperatures, and it's impacting their operations, harvests and bottom lines. These ongoing trends have underscored the critical need for more advanced short-term weather forecasts and long-term climate projections to make these businesses more resilient.

Maxar's weather and climate platforms offer innovative SaaS-based solutions that combine input from forecasts and projections from leading agencies with our on-staff expertise, enabling agribusinesses to confront changing conditions with enhanced intelligence, best-in-class forecasts and derived insights. WeatherDesk® provides access to historical, current and short-to-medium range weather forecast data (up to two weeks out) while ClimateDesk ® provides comprehensive probabilistic subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasts (out to 6 months), and longer-range climate projections through 2100 that empower data-driven decision-making.

Informed decision-making for agriculture

Climate variability poses significant risks to agricultural operations. Accurate, S2S climate forecasts help businesses mitigate climate variability-driven risks posed to their agricultural operations. Click through this gallery to see a few recent examples of how ClimateDesk and WeatherDesk work together to provide business intelligence.

These examples highlight the need for reliable climate forecasts that can mitigate risks and enhance decision-making. Traditional weather forecasting methods often fall short in providing the extended range and accuracy required for agricultural monitoring and operations that span the duration of the future or current growing seasons.

ClimateDesk has further insights available to transform how agribusinesses:

• Optimize strategic planning for crop selection and planting dates by better understanding how temperatures and precipitation patterns in future growing seasons may change.

• Enhance resource management of water and fertilizer through forecasts that indicate when to expect precipitation versus needing to use natural resources for irrigation.

• Mitigate increasing risks from perils such as droughts and floods by better understanding the future frequency of such events.

• Refine financial planning with reliable climate forecasts for calculating more accurate yield projections.

ClimateDesk platform's enhanced forecasting capabilities

ClimateDesk builds on the success of Maxar's WeatherDesk platform and delivers a feature often requested from customers: a future-focused look at the elements impacting the agriculture industry. These are some of the components of ClimateDesk that revolutionize climate forecasting:

• Extended forecast range: Daily updated S2S forecasts that start at the present day and extend to 2100 are critical for long-term agricultural planning. They enable operators to anticipate climatic variability with greater confidence and well in advance of traditional short to medium range weather forecasts. These longer-range insights support informed decisions around crop selection, infrastructure investments and strategic adaptation, ensuring more resilient farm operations over time.

• Multimodel ensembles: The Maxar Blended Forecast (MBF) utilizes multiple climate models to quantify uncertainty and capture a broader range of plausible outcomes, variability and tail risk extremes. This approach equips agricultural decision-makers with a deeper understanding of potential risks, helping them optimize resource allocation and manage operational uncertainties. By considering diverse climate scenarios, agribusinesses can better plan for extremes, refine water management, and develop more robust financial strategies, ensuring they remain proactive in addressing climate-driven challenges.

• Better resolution: By downscaling coarse climate model ensembles (50 km and greater) to regional and local resolutions (1 km), ClimateDesk provides hyper-local insights essential for farm-level decision-making.

• Comprehensive climate parameters: 
  • Temperature and precipitation 
  • Growing degree days and frost days 
  • Deviation from climatology 
  • Customizable insights on agriculture-related parameters for specific crops and regions 

• Integration of climate signals: For S2S forecasting, ClimateDesk integrates current oceanic and atmospheric signals, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (a global climate phenomenon that emerges from variations in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical Pacific Ocean), the North Atlantic Oscillation and others. These signals, historically used to influence weather patterns, are now combined with fully coupled land surface, ocean and atmospheric physics-based models to account for the evolving climate of today, offering a more comprehensive and accurate forecast.

Validation and reliability

A key benefit of ClimateDesk is data produced at a local resolution of 1 km from coarser resolution, disparate data sources. ClimateDesk provides transparent peer-reviewed scientific downscaling methodologies for increasing the resolution and improving S2S forecast skill. ClimateDesk S2S forecasts are validated against comparable forecasts from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), widely recognized as the global leader in terms of weather and climate forecast skill.

ClimateDesk employs rigorous validation using the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), equivalent to the mean absolute error statistical metric for probabilistic forecasts, ensuring forecast reliability and skill across various applications. This is the same type of skill assessment measure as used in Google's WeatherBench2 project for the assessment of probabilistic forecasts.

The carousel below displays results from validation of ClimateDesk's 2023 projections for average temperature, maximum temperature and precipitation in different regions of the world. Overall, these graphics show that Maxar's forecasts for the 6-month period are substantially more accurate than the publicly available seasonal forecasts for the same period. Specifically, Maxar's forecasts improved temperature forecast skill by ~31% and precipitation forecast skill by ~15% over these key regions. Better data means better decisions.

Leveraging the latest climate intelligence innovations for better business outcomes

The agricultural sector is at the forefront of climate change impacts, and Maxar's ClimateDesk offer a powerful solution to navigate this uncertain landscape. By harnessing the power of Maxar's advanced geospatial climate intelligence, agribusinesses can increase their resilience, optimize resource efficiency, and sustain profitability amidst evolving climate challenges and opportunities.