# Earth Observation Dataset

Over Brazil's semi-arid Ceará state, a study using ten Earth Observation variables from 2000 to 2023 measured how much desertification is actually predictable: the state-wide mean degradation index rose about 0.005 per year, yet most year-to-year change at 2.2 km is not explained by these satellite data, and a gradient-boosting model given every channel explained only 4.7% of its variance. A residual ConvLSTM that predicts only the change from the last observed state lowered RMSE against persistence by 1.6% one year ahead and 4.4% four years ahead on a held-out southern band, reproducing 53–69% of the regional drift. The forecast is reliable for the regional trend, not for individual cells.

Over Brazil's semi-arid Ceará state, a study using ten Earth Observation variables from 2000 to 2023 measured how much desertification is actually predictable: the state-wide mean degradation index rose about 0.005 per year, yet most year-to-year change at 2.2 km is not explained by these satellite data, and a gradient-boosting model given every channel explained only 4.7% of its variance. A residual ConvLSTM that predicts only the change from the last observed state lowered RMSE against persistence by 1.6% one year ahead and 4.4% four years ahead on a held-out southern band, reproducing 53–69% of the regional drift. The forecast is reliable for the regional trend, not for individual cells.