OPENCIVTECHFields and gardens.
What the sky over Atri says for the next seven days, explained for anyone with a field, an olive grove or a vegetable garden.
This is a weather model forecast, rewritten in plain words for people who grow things. It is not an official bulletin: for weather alerts only AllarMeteo Abruzzo applies.
This week in Atri
Reading the forecast…
Day by day
How much water the garden needs
Over the next 7 days, for each square metre of garden in full growth
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One millimetre of rain is one litre of water on one square metre. So the sum is simple: what soil and plants lose to sun and wind, minus the rain that arrives.
Olive groves and vineyards from above
The comparison with past years is not available yet.
The dark line is this year; the others are past years. Higher means greener as seen from the satellite.
Each square is an area of about 4 km² with at least 20 hectares of crops and at least 3 different plots: we never look at a single field, and nobody's property can be recognised. The greenness is the NDVI index from Sentinel-2 (Copernicus, 10 metres), which sees leaves and the grass between the rows together: it does not say whether a plant is sick. We compare with the past years available (few years to say what is normal: a year missing for a crop is not counted), and the threshold for "different from usual" (0.05 NDVI) is our own choice. Where the sky was cloudy, data are missing. Crops come from the Region's land-use map (2018-2019): some groves may have changed. It updates about every 10 days.
How much countryside turns into concrete
Seen from space, concrete, asphalt and roofs cover about 258 hectares of Atri: 2.8% of the territory. The rest is farmland, woods and badlands.
2024 survey, the most recent one out: this satellite data is refreshed only every 3 years, not more often.
Copernicus data (European Environment Agency), "Imperviousness" layer at 10 and 20 metres, clipped to the town boundary. Only real changes count, not those caused by a change of method (product manual). The two periods come from different versions of the product: do not read them as a trend. A pixel is 400 m², so the smallest new surfaces can be missed. The 2026 national ISPRA-SNPA report uses a different method and gives different figures: they are in the land-consumption dossier.
How we compute it, and what it doesn't know
- Forecast: Open-Meteo, which uses the models of national and European weather services. The page reads it on every visit, in your browser: we store nothing.
- Water lost: reference evapotranspiration by the FAO-56 method (Allen et al., FAO 1998), computed by Open-Meteo. A garden in full growth needs about this much; young or freshly transplanted plants use less. Soil, mulch and exposure change the result a lot.
- Cold: this is the minimum temperature 2 metres above ground. On clear, still nights the ground can be a few degrees colder, and the valley floors colder than the town. That is why we flag nights at 3 °C or below.
- Limits: it is a forecast, and the further away the day, the less reliable it is. Forecast rain may not come, or may fall elsewhere in the area.