As the result of the NEDO SBIR acceleration program, Tenchijin, Inc, a JAXA-accredited space venture successfully developed their Land Surface Temperature Product with high resolution and frequency. As their next step towards commercialization, they are planning to integrate the product into their land evaluation engine Tenchijin COMPASS to provide an advanced solution for their customers and end users.
Conventionally used land surface temperature data is obtained from the low earth orbit satellite because of (1) the superior spatial resolution from satellites close to the Earth surface and (2) the homogeneous data quality provided globally. On the other hand, the disadvantage of this option was the low frequency (once in two days) of data acquisition and the dependence on the weather as they could not acquire data when the surface was hidden by clouds.
Tenchijin focused on the observation frequency and the observation band of thermal infrared range of the satellite Himawari, and utilized the information from Himawari to update this Product with high frequent (once in 2.5 minutes) observation. Furthermore, Tenchijin, Inc developed a hyper-resolution deep learning model utilizing the massive observation data. This newly developed algorithm achieved a resolution of 100 meters and excludes cloud interference. This level of data of the ground surface temperature with high accuracy on the order of 100 meters and frequency of 2.5 minutes intervals is expected to be used practically in various industries that require extremely accurate and frequent data - such as agriculture, real estate, urban development and energy.
Tenchijin, Inc. will implement the new product into their product “Tenchijin COMPASS” and “Tenchijin COMPASS API”, and are preparing to provide a solution for the end users.
NEDO SBIR and development of the Product
Tenchijin, Inc was elected and had been working on this development under the NEDO SBIR Promotion Program R&D theme “Development of services that has the potential in solving social issues utilizing the data from geostationary satellite Himawari.”