🛰️Remote sensing

Company information derived from satellite data.

Remote sensing data has many areas of application. At ISTARI.AI, we derive novel indicators at company level from satellite data in order to assess the environmental quality of a company location. To do this, we draw on freely available data from the Copernicus programme of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Air quality

Our focus to date has been on assessing air quality. As part of the Sentinel-5P satellite, the TROPOMI (Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument) sensor was developed, which can estimate the concentration of air pollutants in a defined air column with an unprecedented spatial resolution. Since 2017, this satellite has been measuring the concentration of sulphur dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide and other pollutants worldwide on a daily basis. We use this data, aggregated over a one-year time series, and allocate it to our company locations. We also created a joint indicator that combines various air pollutant measurements into one categorisation of air quality at a firm location.

We have already published the study "Greenwashing in the US metal industry? A novel approach combining SO2 concentrations from satellite data, a plant-level firm database and web text mining" that uses this data. Check it out here.

Climate data

Additionally, we provide climate date for each firm location. For this, we have added the average temperature and precipitation to our database.