ABSTRACT
Since the launching of the first LANDSAT satellite in 1972, civil remote sensing has been extensively applied for crop inventories. Crop yield assessment is, in fact, a very important economic operation and its procedures are difficult to control owing to the inherent variability of yields due to human but more often, meteorological factors. Spatial remote sensing is used operationally for assessment of foreign crop yields by United States Department of Agriculture and by private companies who sell their services essentially for speculation on market prices. The European Commission uses remote sensing essentially for estimation of areas and indirectly for verification of agrometeorological models of yield prediction. The Crop Growth Monitoring System model is based on a large geocoded database covering all of Europe, whose parameters determine operation of a growth model for the important annual crops of Europe using meteorological data as input.
