Data is the new oil today but what if that data was actually being used to monitor the oil around the world? Oil is an area which concerns many nations and has been at the center of the storm for quite a long time. It isn’t easy to monitor the oil inventory around the world since nobody has a clear idea about the amount of oil left on the planet.

Orbital Insight, a Geospatial Big Data company, analyses vast amounts of photos of oil tanks with floating lids. When the level of oil goes down in these tanks, the lid also sinks, and the shadows cast by the sun on the inside of the tank also changes. By detecting patterns in how those shadows change, analysts can estimate how much oil is available in all the tanks it monitors. The company uses techniques like Computer vision and Deep learning to do the analysis which in turn helps to discover information that affects the global economy, like oil surpluses or shortages.

Objective In this article, we shall study how we can examine the vegetation cover of a region with the help of satellite data. This article aims to familiarise the readers with the concept of satellite imagery data and how it can be analyzed to investigate real-world environmental and humanitarian challenges.