Abstract ID: 66

METEOSAT Second Generation Data for Assessment of Daily Vegetation Condition Status over the Brazilian Amazon

Frequent monitoring of the vegetation dynamics at regional scale is important in ecosystem variability studies and in understanding the interactions between the climate variability and terrestrial ecosystem carbon exchange. One of the greatest challenges in the monitoring of changing detection of terrestrial biomes is how to disentangle the effects of climate and human-induced land degradation impact on vegetation dynamics. There have been limited investigations on the operational utilization of satellite-derived vegetation indices to daily monitor the spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation activity at regional scale. Part of this problem concerns the causing diurnal variations for cloud contamination, illumination and viewing geometry. The METEOSAT SEVIRI instrument posses all spectral channels to characterize daily the changes of the Earth vegetation. One of the most popular approaches to monitor the state of vegetation is the application of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) derived from space-based remote sensing data as a good proxy for plant productivity. Therefore, the monitoring of the state of vegetation in terrestrial biomes, particularly in high-frequency observations, is of great importance. With this respect, in this study we present first results on daily composite NDVI image deriving from level 1.5 SEVIRI data received via EUMETCast covering the Brazilian Amazon. To be able to preliminary generate of daily composite NDVI image, cloud masked surface reflectance in the red and near infrared channels for each image and followed by maximum of the images from 10 am to 2 pm local solar time were computed. Our preliminary results show the daily maximum-composite METEOSAT NDVI track vegetation dynamics over the Brazilian Amazon and provide new opportunities for integrative studies of carbon/land use activities. This work is in progress and awaits the comparisons between time series of our SEVIRI NDVI analysis and LAND SAF fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) product.

Session:  Feedbacks to Climate - Emissions of natural and biomass burning particulates from vegetation and their effects on ecosystems and climate.

Presentation Type:  Poster