Remote Sens. 2013, 5(8), 4031-4044; doi:10.3390/rs5084031
A Comparative Analysis between GIMSS NDVIg and NDVI3g for Monitoring Vegetation Activity Change in the Northern Hemisphere during 1982–2008
1
State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
2
College of Resources Science & Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
3
Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 9 June 2013 / Revised: 18 July 2013 / Accepted: 6 August 2013 / Published: 12 August 2013
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Monitoring Global Vegetation with AVHRR NDVI3g Data (1981-2011))
Abstract
The long-term Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series data set generated from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers (AVHRR) has been widely used to monitor vegetation activity change. The third version of NDVI (NDVI3g) produced by the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) group was released recently. The comparisons between the new and old versions should be conducted for linking existing studies with future applications of NDVI3g in monitoring vegetation activity change. Based on simple and piecewise linear regression methods, this study made a comparative analysis between NDVIg and NDVI3g for monitoring vegetation activity change and its responses to climate change in the middle and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere during 1982–2008. Our results indicated that there were large differences between NDVIg and NDVI3g in the spatial patterns for both the overall changing trends and the timing of Turning Points (TP) in NDVI time series, which spread over almost the entire study region. The average NDVI trend from NDVI3g was almost twice as great as that from NDVIg and the detected average timing of TP from NDVI3g was about one year later. Although the general spatial patterns were consistent between two data sets for detecting the responses of growing-season NDVI to temperature and precipitation changes, there were large differences in the response magnitude, with a higher response magnitude to temperature in NDVI3g and an opposite response to precipitation change for the two data sets. These results demonstrated that the NDVIg data set may underestimate the vegetation activity change trend and its response to climate change in the middle and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere during the past three decades. View Full-TextKeywords:
GIMMS; NDVI; vegetation; climate change; Northern Hemisphere
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0).
Scifeed alert for new publications
Never miss any articles matching your research from any publisher- Get alerts for new papers matching your research
- Find out the new papers from selected authors
- Updated daily for 49'000+ journals and 6000+ publishers
- Define your Scifeed now
Share & Cite This Article
MDPI and ACS Style
Jiang, N.; Zhu, W.; Zheng, Z.; Chen, G.; Fan, D. A Comparative Analysis between GIMSS NDVIg and NDVI3g for Monitoring Vegetation Activity Change in the Northern Hemisphere during 1982–2008. Remote Sens. 2013, 5, 4031-4044.
Related Articles
Article Metrics
Comments
[Return to top]
Remote Sens.
EISSN 2072-4292
Published by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland
RSS
E-Mail Table of Contents Alert