scholarly journals Cloud Cover throughout All the Paddy Rice Fields in Guangdong, China: Impacts on Sentinel 2 MSI and Landsat 8 OLI Optical Observations

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 2961
Author(s):  
Rui Jiang ◽  
Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa ◽  
Kati Laakso ◽  
Yan Xu ◽  
Zhiyan Zhou ◽  
...  

Cloud cover hinders the effective use of vegetation indices from optical satellite-acquired imagery in cloudy agricultural production areas, such as Guangdong, a subtropical province in southern China which supports two-season rice production. The number of cloud-free observations for the earth-orbiting optical satellite sensors must be determined to verify how much their observations are affected by clouds. This study determines the quantified wide-ranging impact of clouds on optical satellite observations by mapping the annual total observations (ATOs), annual cloud-free observations (ACFOs), monthly cloud-free observations (MCFOs) maps, and acquisition probability (AP) of ACFOs for the Sentinel 2 (2017–2019) and Landsat 8 (2014–2019) for all the paddy rice fields in Guangdong province (APRFG), China. The ATOs of Landsat 8 showed relatively stable observations compared to the Sentinel 2, and the per-field ACFOs of Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 were unevenly distributed. The MCFOs varied on a monthly basis, but in general, the MCFOs were greater between August and December than between January and July. Additionally, the AP of usable ACFOs with 52.1% (Landsat 8) and 47.7% (Sentinel 2) indicated that these two satellite sensors provided markedly restricted observation capability for rice in the study area. Our findings are particularly important and useful in the tropics and subtropics, and the analysis has described cloud cover frequency and pervasiveness throughout different portions of the rice growing season, providing insight into how rice monitoring activities by using Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 imagery in Guangdong would be impacted by cloud cover.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (21) ◽  
pp. 4465
Author(s):  
Yu Shen ◽  
Xiaoyang Zhang ◽  
Weile Wang ◽  
Ramakrishna Nemani ◽  
Yongchang Ye ◽  
...  

Accurate and timely land surface phenology (LSP) provides essential information for investigating the responses of terrestrial ecosystems to climate changes and quantifying carbon and surface energy cycles on the Earth. LSP has been widely investigated using daily Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) observations, but the resultant phenometrics are frequently influenced by surface heterogeneity and persistent cloud contamination in the time series observations. Recently, LSP has been derived from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 time series providing detailed spatial pattern, but the results are of high uncertainties because of poor temporal resolution. With the availability of data from Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard a new generation of geostationary satellites that observe the earth every 10–15 min, daily cloud-free time series could be obtained with high opportunities. Therefore, this study investigates the generation of synthetic high spatiotemporal resolution time series by fusing the harmonized Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 (HLS) time series with the temporal shape of ABI data for monitoring field-scale (30 m) LSP. The algorithm is verified by detecting the timings of greenup and senescence onsets around north Wisconsin/Michigan states, United States, where cloud cover is frequent during spring rainy season. The LSP detections from HLS-ABI are compared with those from HLS or ABI alone and are further evaluated using PhenoCam observations. The result indicates that (1) ABI could provide ~3 times more high-quality observations than HLS around spring greenup onset; (2) the greenup and senescence onsets derived from ABI and HLS-ABI are spatially consistent and statistically comparable with a median difference less than 1 and 10-days, respectively; (3) greenup and senescence onsets derived from HLS data show sharp boundaries around the orbit-overlapped areas and shifts of ~13 days delay and ~15 days ahead, respectively, relative to HLS-ABI detections; and (4) HLS-ABI greenup and senescence onsets align closely to PhenoCam observations with an absolute average difference of less than 2 days and 5 days, respectively, which are much better than phenology detections from ABI or HLS alone. The result suggests that the proposed approach could be implemented the monitor of 30 m LSP over regions with persistent cloud cover.


2021 ◽  
pp. 70-77
Author(s):  
Т.К. МУЗЫЧЕНКО ◽  
М.Н. МАСЛОВА

В статье рассмотрено пространственное распределение типов земель в пределах трансграничного бассейна р. Раздольная. На основе дешифрирования космических снимков Sentinel-2 и Landsat 8 составлена карта пространственного распределения типов земель по состоянию на 2019 г. Исходя из геоэкологической классификации ландшафтов В.А. Николаева в данной работе было выделено 12 типов земель: используемые и неиспользуемые сельскохозяйственные земли, используемые и неиспользуемые рисовые поля, карьеры, леса, лесопосадки, рубки, луга, застроенные земли, водные объекты, а также кустарники и редколесья. Представлены абсолютные и относительные площади для каждого типа земель по трансграничному бассейну в целом, а также отдельно для его российской и китайской частей. По результатам дешифрирования данных дистанционного зондирования установлено, что российская и китайская части бассейна р. Раздольная имеют существенные трансграничные различия в структуре земель. На российской части бассейна лесами покрыто чуть более половины площади, но при этом значительные площади занимают сельскохозяйственные земли и луга. В некоторых местах луга и сельскохозяйственные земли преобладают в большей степени, чем леса. На китайской части лесные территории доминируют над другими типами земель. Сельскохозяйственные земли и луга образуют узкие и длинные полосы и имеют более мозаичное распространение, чем на российской части. Здесь заметно меньше площади застроенных земель, а площади рубок и лесопосадок больше, чем на российской части. Площади карьеров примерно равны в обеих частях бассейна. The transboundary Razdolnaya river basin is nearly evenly split up between Primorsky Krai of Russian Federation and Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces of People’s Republic of China. The Chinese and the Russian parts of the transboundary river have developed independently of each other. Therefore, the two have a different land cover and land use structure. The analysis of land cover and land use structure is of utmost importance for the understanding the modern state of land development and the possibilities of its future development. Using the remote sensing data, such as Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 satellite imagery, the land cover and land use map of the Razdolnaya transboundary river basin for 2019 has been composed by means of the ArcMap 10.5 software package. According to V.A. Nikolaev’s geoecological classification of landscapes, we have identified 12 land types: forests, meadows, shrubs and woodlands, agricultural lands, unused agricultural lands, rice fields, unused rice fields, built-up areas, reforestation lands, logging, quarries, and bodies of water. We have provided area coverage for each type of land of the whole transboundary basin, and for the Russian and Chinese parts. According to the results of computer-aided visual deciphering and automatic deciphering, forests are the most common land use type in the basin. In the Chinese part of the basin, forests dominate over the other types of land. Agricultural lands and meadows have assumed narrow and linear shapes. Built-up areas have less coverage here than in the Russian part of the basin. However, the coverage of logging and reforestation lands is considerably larger than in the Russian part of the basin. In the Russian part of the basin, forests co-dominate with the agricultural lands and meadows. In some areas of this part of the basin forests disappear almost completely. The Russian part of the basin also has the larger coverage of shrubs and woodlands, unused agricultural lands, rice fields and unused rice fields. The coverage of quarries is roughly equal in both parts of the basin.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Hung Nguyen Trong ◽  
The Dung Nguyen ◽  
Martin Kappas

This paper aims to (i) optimize the application of multiple bands of satellite images for land cover classification by using random forest algorithms and (ii) assess correlations and regression of vegetation indices of a better-performed land cover classification image with vertical and horizontal structures of tropical lowland forests in Central Vietnam. In this study, we used Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 to classify seven land cover classes of which three forest types were substratified as undisturbed, low disturbed, and disturbed forests where forest inventory of 90 plots, as ground-truth, was randomly sampled to measure forest tree parameters. A total of 3226 training points were sampled on seven land cover types. The performance of Landsat-8 showed out-of-bag error of 31.6%, overall accuracy of 68%, kappa of 67.5%, while Sentinel-2 showed out-of-bag error of 14.3% and overall accuracy of 85.7% and kappa of 83%. Ten vegetation indices of the better-performed image were extracted to find out (i) the correlation and regression of horizontal and vertical structures of trees and (ii) assess the variation values between ground-truthing plots and training sample plots in three forest types. The result of the t test on vegetation indices showed that six out of ten vegetation indices were significant at p<0.05. Seven vegetation indices had a correlation with the horizontal structure, but four vegetation indices, namely, Enhanced Vegetation Index, Perpendicular Vegetation Index, Difference Vegetation Index, and Transformed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, had better correlations r = 0.66, 0.65, 0.65, 0.63 and regression results were of R2 = 0.44, 0.43, 0.43, and 0.40, respectively. The correlations of tree height were r = 0.46, 0.43, 0.43, and 0.49 and its regressions were of R2 = 0.21, 0.19, 0.18, and 0.24, respectively. The results show the possibility of using random forest algorithm with Sentinel-2 in forest type classification in line with vegetation indices application.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 2708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qi Wang ◽  
Jiancheng Li ◽  
Taoyong Jin ◽  
Xin Chang ◽  
Yongchao Zhu ◽  
...  

Soil moisture is an important variable in ecological, hydrological, and meteorological studies. An effective method for improving the accuracy of soil moisture retrieval is the mutual supplementation of multi-source data. The sensor configuration and band settings of different optical sensors lead to differences in band reflectivity in the inter-data, further resulting in the differences between vegetation indices. The combination of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data with multi-source optical data has been widely used for soil moisture retrieval. However, the influence of vegetation indices derived from different sources of optical data on retrieval accuracy has not been comparatively analyzed thus far. Therefore, the suitability of vegetation parameters derived from different sources of optical data for accurate soil moisture retrieval requires further investigation. In this study, vegetation indices derived from GF-1, Landsat-8, and Sentinel-2 were compared. Based on Sentinel-1 SAR and three optical data, combined with the water cloud model (WCM) and the advanced integral equation model (AIEM), the accuracy of soil moisture retrieval was investigated. The results indicate that, Sentinel-2 data were more sensitive to vegetation characteristics and had a stronger capability for vegetation signal detection. The ranking of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values from the three sensors was as follows: the largest was in Sentinel-2, followed by Landsat-8, and the value of GF-1 was the smallest. The normalized difference water index (NDWI) value of Landsat-8 was larger than that of Sentinel-2. With reference to the relative components in the WCM model, the contribution of vegetation scattering exceeded that of soil scattering within a vegetation index range of approximately 0.55–0.6 in NDVI-based models and all ranges in NDWI1-based models. The threshold value of NDWI2 for calculating vegetation water content (VWC) was approximately an NDVI value of 0.4–0.55. In the soil moisture retrieval, Sentinel-2 data achieved higher accuracy than data from the other sources and thus was more suitable for the study for combination with SAR in soil moisture retrieval. Furthermore, compared with NDVI, higher accuracy of soil moisture could be retrieved by using NDWI1 (R2 = 0.623, RMSE = 4.73%). This study provides a reference for the selection of optical data for combination with SAR in soil moisture retrieval.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 3400
Author(s):  
Shishi Liu ◽  
Yuren Chen ◽  
Yintao Ma ◽  
Xiaoxuan Kong ◽  
Xinyu Zhang ◽  
...  

Mapping rice cropping systems is important for grain yield prediction and food security assessments. Both single- and double-season rice are the dominant rice systems in central China. However, because of increasing labor shortages and high costs, there has been a gradual decline in double-season rice. Ratoon rice (RR) has been proposed as an alternative system that balances the productivity, cost, and labor requirements of rice cultivation. RR has been expanding in central China, encouraged by the improved cultivars, machinery, and favorable policies. However, to our knowledge, the distribution of RR has not been mapped with remote sensing techniques. This study developed a phenology-based algorithm to map RR at a 10 m resolution in Hubei Province, Central China, using dense time stacks of Sentinel-2 images (cloud cover <80%) in 2018. The key in differentiating RR from the other rice cropping systems is through the timing of maturity. We proposed to use two contrast vegetation indices to identify RR fields. The newly-developed yellowness index (YI) calculated with the reflectance of blue, green, and red bands was used to detect the ripening phase, and the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) was used to detect the green-up of the second-season crop to eliminate the misclassification caused by stubbles left in the field. The RR map demonstrated that RR was mainly distributed in the low alluvial plains of central and southern Hubei Province. The total planting area of RR in 2018 was 2225.4 km2, accounting for 10.03% of the total area of paddy rice fields. The overall accuracy of RR, non-RR rice fields, and non-rice land cover types was 0.76. The adjusted overall accuracy for RR and non-RR was 0.91, indicating that the proposed YI and the phenology-based algorithm could accurately identify RR fields from the paddy rice fields.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nithin Santosh Kumar

Digital Elevation Models are a representation of Earth’s surface and are used in many areas of research. There are a number of freely available DEMs with near-global coverage, which have elevation accuracies ranging between 10 to 25 m. This project attempts to generate DEMs of comparable accuracy using open source images from satellite sensors and web mapping services. Images from Landsat 8, ASTER, and Sentinel-2 satellites, and from Microsoft’s Bing Maps were used to generate DEMs for a 6.633 km2 area in Oshawa, Canada. It was found that it is key that when combining images from different spaceborne sensors, the spatial resolution should be within 10 m of one another. Additionally, the radiometry of the images, in terms of intensity and contrast, must be similar. The highest accuracies of DEMs had RMSE values of 20.047 m and 20.579 m, when combining images from Sentinel-2 with ASTER and Landsat 8, respectively.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eatidal Amin ◽  
Santiago Belda ◽  
Luca Pipia ◽  
Zoltan Szantoi ◽  
Ahmed El Baroudy ◽  
...  

&lt;p&gt;Monitoring of crop phenology significantly assists agricultural managing practices and plays an important role in crop yield predictions. Multi-temporal satellite-based observations allow analyzing vegetation seasonal dynamics over large areas by using vegetation indices or deriving biophysical variables. The Northern Nile Delta represents about half of all agricultural lands of Egypt. In this region, intensifying farming systems are predominant, which translates into a pressure on water supply demand. Moreover, double cropping rotations schemes are increasing, requiring a high temporal and spatial resolution monitoring for capturing successive crop growth cycles. This study presents a framework for crop phenological characterization based on high spatial and temporal resolution time series of green Leaf Area Index (LAI). Particularly, NASA's Harmonized Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 (HLS) surface reflectance dataset was used. The HLS dataset provides seamless products from both satellites, enabling global land observations every 2-3 days at 30m. A green LAI retrieval model was originally trained using ground-based LAI measurements with Gaussian processes technique and validated for Sentinel-2 (R2: 0.7, RMSE= 0.67m2/m2) (Amin et al., 2020). Given the compatible spectral bands configuration of both sensors, a new model for Landsat 8 was adapted from the original one. Both models were implemented in an HLS image based automated retrieval chain obtaining therefore two different LAI time series, which were spatially averaged per crop parcel according to the ground data at disposal. The subsequent analysis was performed based on the time series phenological pre-processing and modelling implemented in the in-house developed scientific time series toolbox DATimeS (Belda et al., 2020). The proposed framework permitted to determine the crop patterns for four consecutive years (2016-2019), identifying one or two seasons per year, for single (e.g. grape, citrus) or double-cropping (e.g. maize-onion, maize-wheat, rice-clover), respectively. Alongside, each detected crop was characterized by retrieving a selected set of phenological parameters, which were contrasted with respect to the established crop type calendar (planting and harvesting dates) and for each crop type, the annual mean value was computed and the intra annual variability within the four years was assessed.&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Amin, E., Verrelst, J., Rivera-Caicedo, J. P., Pipia, L., Ruiz-Verd&amp;#250;, A., &amp; Moreno, J. (2020). Prototyping Sentinel-2 green LAI and brown LAI products for cropland monitoring. Remote Sensing of Environment, 112168.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Belda, S., Pipia, L., Morcillo-Pallar&amp;#233;s, P., Rivera-Caicedo, J. P., Amin, E., De Grave, C., &amp; Verrelst, J. (2020). DATimeS: A machine learning time series GUI toolbox for gap-filling and vegetation phenology trends detection. Environmental Modelling &amp; Software, 104666.&lt;/p&gt;


2022 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hadi Shams Esfandabadi ◽  
Mohsen Ghamary Asl ◽  
Zahra Shams Esfandabadi ◽  
Sneha Gautam ◽  
Meisam Ranjbari

PurposeThis research aims to monitor vegetation indices to assess drought in paddy rice fields in Mazandaran, Iran, and propose the best index to predict rice yield.Design/methodology/approachA three-step methodology is applied. First, the paddy rice fields are mapped by using three satellite-based datasets, namely SRTM DEM, Landsat8 TOA and MYD11A2. Second, the maps of indices are extracted using MODIS. And finally, the trend of indices over rice-growing seasons is extracted and compared with the rice yield data.FindingsRice paddies maps and vegetation indices maps are provided. Vegetation Health Index (VHI) combining average Temperature Condition Index (TCI) and minimum Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), and also VHI combining TCImin and VCImin are found to be the most proper indices to predict rice yield.Practical implicationsThe results serve as a guideline for policy-makers and practitioners in the agro-food industry to (1) support sustainable agriculture and food safety in terms of rice production; (2) help balance the supply and demand sides of the rice market and move towards SDG2; (3) use yield prediction in the rice supply chain management, pricing and trade flows management; and (4) assess drought risk in index-based insurances.Originality/valueThis study, as one of the first research assessing and mapping vegetation indices for rice paddies in northern Iran, particularly contributes to (1) extracting the map of paddy rice fields in Mazandaran Province by using satellite-based data on cloud-computing technology in the Google Earth Engine platform; (2) providing the map of VCI and TCI for the period 2010–2019 based on MODIS data and (3) specifying the best index to describe rice yield through proposing different calculation methods for VHI.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Carrasco ◽  
Aneurin O’Neil ◽  
R. Morton ◽  
Clare Rowland

Land cover mapping of large areas is challenging due to the significant volume of satellite data to acquire and process, as well as the lack of spatial continuity due to cloud cover. Temporal aggregation—the use of metrics (i.e., mean or median) derived from satellite data over a period of time—is an approach that benefits from recent increases in the frequency of free satellite data acquisition and cloud-computing power. This enables the efficient use of multi-temporal data and the exploitation of cloud-gap filling techniques for land cover mapping. Here, we provide the first formal comparison of the accuracy between land cover maps created with temporal aggregation of Sentinel-1 (S1), Sentinel-2 (S2), and Landsat-8 (L8) data from one-year and test whether this method matches the accuracy of traditional approaches. Thirty-two datasets were created for Wales by applying automated cloud-masking and temporally aggregating data over different time intervals, using Google Earth Engine. Manually processed S2 data was used for comparison using a traditional two-date composite approach. Supervised classifications were created, and their accuracy was assessed using field-based data. Temporal aggregation only matched the accuracy of the traditional two-date composite approach (77.9%) when an optimal combination of optical and radar data was used (76.5%). Combined datasets (S1, S2 or S1, S2, and L8) outperformed single-sensor datasets, while datasets based on spectral indices obtained the lowest levels of accuracy. The analysis of cloud cover showed that to ensure at least one cloud-free pixel per time interval, a maximum of two intervals per year for temporal aggregation were possible with L8, while three or four intervals could be used for S2. This study demonstrates that temporal aggregation is a promising tool for integrating large amounts of data in an efficient way and that it can compensate for the lower quality of automatic image selection and cloud masking. It also shows that combining data from different sensors can improve classification accuracy. However, this study highlights the need for identifying optimal combinations of satellite data and aggregation parameters in order to match the accuracy of manually selected and processed image composites.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Talita Pertille ◽  
Marcos Felipe Nicoletti ◽  
Larissa Regina Topanotti ◽  
Thiago Floriani Stepka

This research aimed to estimate the biomass of the trunk area of a Pinus taeda L. stand from vegetation indices from Landsat-8/OLI and Sentinel-2/MSI optical remote sensors. In order to obtain the biomass, a forest inventory was carried out with the installation of 33 circular plots of 400 m², in which all the individuals had the diameter at breast height (cm) and the total height (m) measured. Then, 30 trees were scaled by the Smalian method. The individual tree volume was estimated by the Meyer regression volumetric equation. The biomass was obtained through the product of the individual tree volume by the wood basic density. Subsequently, aerial biomass was obtained per plot. The processed orbital images were gathered from the Landsat-8/OLI and Sentinel-2/MSI sensors. We derived 19 vegetation indices for both images, which were correlated with the biomass per plot. The indexes with the best correlation with the biomass were considered as regression variables to develop models by the Stepwise technique (Backward and Forward). The correlation was significant among the variables and the best model was derived from the Landsat-8 data, which estimated the biomass per plot with an error of 8.75% and an adjusted coefficient of determination of 0.8173. Nevertheless, the statistical analysis revealed that there was no significant difference between the biomass estimated by the inventory and by the remotely located data.


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