Satellite survey

A continent-scale map of center-pivot irrigation, built from Sentinel-2.

We downloaded a cloud-free 10 m Sentinel-2 composite for every state and province in scope, then ran a Hough Circle Transform with RANSAC validation to find every center-pivot field ≥ 600 m diameter — green AND brown, irrigated AND fallow.

38,897
pivots detected
1
regions live
10 m
pixel resolution
≥600 m
diameter floor

Regions

United States — CONUS

38,897
center-pivot circles ≥ 600 m diameter, across 49 states/provinces
View map & data → GeoJSON

Canada

in progress
scenes still downloading · detections pending

Mexico

in progress
scenes still downloading · detections pending

How it works

For each region we (1) query the Element 84 Earth Search STAC for Sentinel-2 L2A scenes in a 45-day window, (2) mask cloud-flagged pixels via the scene's SCL band and take the per-pixel median across all clear timesteps, (3) reproject and mosaic to a single per-state Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF in the regional Albers / Lambert projection, and (4) run a multi-stage Hough Circle Transform with interior-smoothness ratio and per-candidate RANSAC circle fit. The yellow circles on each map are drawn at the detector's reported (center, radius).