Earth ID: 3649

Food Consumers versus Food Producers

Visualizations by Lori Perkins Released on October 6, 2009

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to strengthen collaboration. In support of this collaboration, NASA and the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) jointly funded a new project to assimilate NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data and products into an existing decision support system (DSS) operated by the International Production Assessment Division (IPAD) of FAS. To meet its objectives, FAS/IPAD uses satellite data and data products to monitor agriculture worldwide and to locate and keep track of natural disasters such as short and long term droughts, floods and persistent snow cover which impair agricultural productivity. FAS is the largest user of satellite imagery in the non-military sector of the U.S. government. For the last 20 years FAS has used a combination of Landsat and NOAA-AVHRR satellite data to monitor crop condition and report on episodic events.

The countries that produce 82% of the world's cereals (grain, oats, wheat, rice, maize, millet, sorghum) are shown in yellow and the world population is shown in brown.

The countries that produced 82% of the world's cereals (grain,oats,wheat,rice,maize, millet, sorghum) in 2008 are shown in yellow and the world population is shown in brown. This version of the image does not have topography.

Visualization Credits

Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC): Lead Animator
Michelle Williams (UMBC): Producer
Chris Justice (University of Maryland): Scientist
Inbal Becker Reshef (University of Maryland): Scientist

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

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https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3649

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