Prithvi-EO-2.0: A Versatile Multi-Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation Applications

This article presents Prithvi-EO-2.0, a new geospatial foundation model (GFM) that offers significant improvements over its predecessor, Prithvi-EO-1.0. Trained on 4.2 million global time-series samples from NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data archive at 30-m resolution, the new model incorporates temporal and location embeddings for enhanced performance across various geospatial tasks. Through extensive benchmarking with GEO-Bench, the model outperforms the previous Prithvi-EO model by 8% across a range of tasks. It also outperforms six other GFMs when benchmarked on remote sensing tasks from different domains and resolutions (i.e., from 0.1 to 15 m). The results demonstrate the versatility of the model in both classical Earth observation (EO) and high-resolution applications. Early involvement of end-users and subject matter experts (SMEs) allowed constant feedback on model and dataset design, enabling customization across diverse SME-led applications in disaster response, land cover and crop mapping, and ecosystem dynamics monitoring. Prithvi-EO-2.0 is available as an open-source model on Hugging Face and IBM TerraTorch, with additional resources on GitHub. The project exemplifies the Trusted Open Science approach embraced by all involved organizations.