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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #271675
Title: A MODIS-based begetation index climatology

Author
item BINDLISH, R - Science Systems, Inc
item Jackson, Thomas
item ZHAO, T - Collaborator

Submitted to: Remote Sensing for Agriculture Ecosystems and Hydrology
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/2/2011
Publication Date: 12/5/2011
Citation: Bindlish, R., Jackson, T.J., Zhao, T. 2011. A MODIS-based begetation index climatology. Remote Sensing for Agriculture Ecosystems and Hydrology. 8156:031-038.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Passive microwave soil moisture algorithms must account for vegetation attenuation of the signal in the retrieval process. One approach to accounting for vegetation is to use vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to estimate the vegetation optical depth. The passive microwave sensor platforms typically do not include sensors for providing this information and the data must be acquired independently. This presents challenges to data processing and integration and concerns about data availability. As an alternative to routine updating of the NDVI, it is possible to use a global vegetation index climatology. This climatology is based on the long term set of observations from the MODIS instrument (10 years). A technique was developed to process the NASA NDVI and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) data base to produce a 10-day annual cycle (climatology) for each 1 km pixel covering the Earth’s land surface. Since our focus was on soil moisture, the classification rules and flags took this into consideration. Techniques developed for processing the indices, development of flags, and expected utilization in soil moisture retrieval algorithms are described.