Watch the UK's land surface change over a year

A Cornish start-up has developed a technique to make cloud-free views of the UK from satellite images.

Aspia Space from Penryn has trained its patented algorithm to interpret the observations from radar spacecraft, which have no problem seeing through cloud, to predict what the ground should look like to a standard satellite imager, if its line of sight happens to be obscured by grey skies.

The sequence above is a synthetic construction of how the UK's land surface changed over the entire year of 2020. Watch how the vegetation surges and dies back through the seasons, and how the mountains of Scotland gain and lose snow cover.

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