scholarly journals Broadband Albedo Observations in the Southern Great Plains

2006 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 210-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claude E. Duchon ◽  
Kenneth G. Hamm

Abstract Time series of daily broadband surface albedo for 1998 and 1999 have been analyzed from six locations in the network of 22 Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program Solar–Infrared Radiation Stations distributed from central Kansas to central Oklahoma. Two of the stations are in Kansas, and four are in Oklahoma; together they reasonably encompass the variation in geography in the southern Great Plains. Daily precipitation totals locally measured or obtained from nearby Oklahoma Mesonet stations and time series of biweekly maximum normalized difference vegetation index obtained from NOAA’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer were used to determine linkages between surface albedo and amount of precipitation and degree of green vegetation. As part of this determination, daily albedo was categorized according to sky condition, that is, clear, partly cloudy, or overcast, with appropriate boundaries for each category. The more notable results are the following: 1) 2-yr mean annual albedos varied by more than 20% among the six sites, the lowest albedo being 0.18 and the highest albedo being 0.22; 2) the numerical difference was about 4 times the maximum interannual mean difference among the six stations, indicating the importance of geographic location; 3) for sites with a large amount of bare soil, a systematic decrease in albedo in response to rainfall events and a systematic increase in albedo as the soil dried were observed; 4) at the one site with total vegetation cover, that is, no bare soil, albedo response to precipitation events was suppressed; 5) no relation was found between mean annual albedo and annual precipitation; 6) whether days were classified as clear or partly cloudy had little influence on daily albedo, but overcast days typically reduced albedo, sometimes substantially; and 7) the main contributor to low albedos on overcast days with rain was the wet surface; the contribution by the overcast sky was secondary.

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 3097-3145
Author(s):  
S. A. McFarlane ◽  
K. L. Gaustad ◽  
E. J. Mlawer ◽  
C. N. Long ◽  
J. Delamere

Abstract. We present a method for identifying dominant surface type and estimating high spectral resolution surface albedo at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facility at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in Oklahoma for use in radiative transfer calculations. Given a set of 6-channel narrowband visible and near-infrared irradiance measurements from upward and downward looking multi-filter radiometers (MFRs), four different surface types (snow-covered, green vegetation, partial vegetation, non-vegetated) can be identified. A normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is used to distinguish between vegetated and non-vegetated surfaces, and a scaled NDVI index is used to estimate the percentage of green vegetation in partially vegetated surfaces. Based on libraries of spectral albedo measurements, a piecewise continuous function is developed to estimate the high spectral resolution surface albedo for each surface type given the MFR albedo values as input. For partially vegetated surfaces, the albedo is estimated as a linear combination of the green vegetation and non-vegetated surface albedo values. The estimated albedo values are evaluated through comparison to high spectral resolution albedo measurements taken during several Intensive Observational Periods (IOPs) and through comparison of the integrated spectral albedo values to observed broadband albedo measurements. The estimated spectral albedo values agree well with observations for the visible wavelengths constrained by the MFR measurements, but have larger biases and variability at longer wavelengths. Additional MFR channels at 1100 nm and/or 1600 nm would help constrain the high resolution spectral albedo in the near infrared region.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 1713-1733 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. A. McFarlane ◽  
K. L. Gaustad ◽  
E. J. Mlawer ◽  
C. N. Long ◽  
J. Delamere

Abstract. We present a method for identifying dominant surface type and estimating high spectral resolution surface albedo at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facility at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in Oklahoma for use in radiative transfer calculations. Given a set of 6-channel narrowband visible and near-infrared irradiance measurements from upward and downward looking multi-filter radiometers (MFRs), four different surface types (snow-covered, green vegetation, partial vegetation, non-vegetated) can be identified. A normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is used to distinguish between vegetated and non-vegetated surfaces, and a scaled NDVI index is used to estimate the percentage of green vegetation in partially vegetated surfaces. Based on libraries of spectral albedo measurements, a piecewise continuous function is developed to estimate the high spectral resolution surface albedo for each surface type given the MFR albedo values as input. For partially vegetated surfaces, the albedo is estimated as a linear combination of the green vegetation and non-vegetated surface albedo values. The estimated albedo values are evaluated through comparison to high spectral resolution albedo measurements taken during several Intensive Observational Periods (IOPs) and through comparison of the integrated spectral albedo values to observed broadband albedo measurements. The estimated spectral albedo values agree well with observations for the visible wavelengths constrained by the MFR measurements, but have larger biases and variability at longer wavelengths. Additional MFR channels at 1100 nm and/or 1600 nm would help constrain the high resolution spectral albedo in the near infrared region.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 244
Author(s):  
Ru Xu

Rural settlements account for 45% of the world’s population and are targeted places for poverty eradication. However, compared to urban footprints, the distribution of rural settlements is not well characterized in most existing land use and land cover maps because of their patchy and scattered organization and relative stability over time. In this study, we proposed a pixel- and object-based method to map rural settlements by employing spectral-texture-temporal information from Landsat and Sentinel time series. Spectral indices (maximum normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and minimum normalized difference built-up index (NDBI composite) and texture indices (vertical transmit and vertical receive (VV) polarization of mean synthetic aperture radar (SAR) composite) were calculated from all available Landsat and Sentinel-1A data from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2018. These features were then stacked for segmentation to extract potential rural settlement objects. To better differentiate settlements from bare soil, the gradient of annual NDVI maximum (namely, gradient of change, use gradient for simplicity) from 1 January 1987 to 31 December 2018 was used. The rural training samples were selected from global urban footprint (GUF) products with a post filtering process to remove sample noise. Scatter plots between pixel- and object-based values per feature were delineated by t-distribution ellipses to determine the thresholds. Finally, pixel- and object-based thresholds were applied to four features (NDVI, NDBI, VV, gradient) in Google Earth Engine (GEE) to obtain the distribution of rural settlements in eight selected Asian regions. The derived maps of rural settlements showed consistent accuracy, with a producer’s accuracy (PA) of 0.87, user’s accuracy (UA) of 0.93 and overall accuracy (OA) reaching 90% in different landscape conditions, which are better than existing land cover products.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1618
Author(s):  
Melakeneh G. Gedefaw ◽  
Hatim M. E. Geli ◽  
Temesgen Alemayehu Abera

Rangelands provide significant socioeconomic and environmental benefits to humans. However, climate variability and anthropogenic drivers can negatively impact rangeland productivity. The main goal of this study was to investigate structural and productivity changes in rangeland ecosystems in New Mexico (NM), in the southwestern United States of America during the 1984–2015 period. This goal was achieved by applying the time series segmented residual trend analysis (TSS-RESTREND) method, using datasets of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies and precipitation from Parameter elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM), and developing an assessment framework. The results indicated that about 17.6% and 12.8% of NM experienced a decrease and an increase in productivity, respectively. More than half of the state (55.6%) had insignificant change productivity, 10.8% was classified as indeterminant, and 3.2% was considered as agriculture. A decrease in productivity was observed in 2.2%, 4.5%, and 1.7% of NM’s grassland, shrubland, and ever green forest land cover classes, respectively. Significant decrease in productivity was observed in the northeastern and southeastern quadrants of NM while significant increase was observed in northwestern, southwestern, and a small portion of the southeastern quadrants. The timing of detected breakpoints coincided with some of NM’s drought events as indicated by the self-calibrated Palmar Drought Severity Index as their number increased since 2000s following a similar increase in drought severity. Some breakpoints were concurrent with some fire events. The combination of these two types of disturbances can partly explain the emergence of breakpoints with degradation in productivity. Using the breakpoint assessment framework developed in this study, the observed degradation based on the TSS-RESTREND showed only 55% agreement with the Rangeland Productivity Monitoring Service (RPMS) data. There was an agreement between the TSS-RESTREND and RPMS on the occurrence of significant degradation in productivity over the grasslands and shrublands within the Arizona/NM Tablelands and in the Chihuahua Desert ecoregions, respectively. This assessment of NM’s vegetation productivity is critical to support the decision-making process for rangeland management; address challenges related to the sustainability of forage supply and livestock production; conserve the biodiversity of rangelands ecosystems; and increase their resilience. Future analysis should consider the effects of rising temperatures and drought on rangeland degradation and productivity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Urška Kanjir ◽  
Nataša Đurić ◽  
Tatjana Veljanovski

The European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2020 timeframe reform will reshape the agriculture land use control procedures from a selected risk fields-based approach into an all-inclusive one. The reform fosters the use of Sentinel data with the objective of enabling greater transparency and comparability of CAP results in different Member States. In this paper, we investigate the analysis of a time series approach using Sentinel-2 images and the suitability of the BFAST (Breaks for Additive Season and Trend) Monitor method to detect changes that correspond to land use anomaly observations in the assessment of agricultural parcel management activities. We focus on identifying certain signs of ineligible (inconsistent) use in permanent meadows and crop fields in one growing season, and in particular those that can be associated with time-defined greenness (vegetation vigor). Depending on the requirements of the BFAST Monitor method and currently time-limited Sentinel-2 dataset for the reliable anomaly study, we introduce customized procedures to support and verify the BFAST Monitor anomaly detection results using the analysis of NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) object-based temporal profiles and time-series standard deviation output, where geographical objects of interest are parcels of particular land use. The validation of land use candidate anomalies in view of land use ineligibilities was performed with the information on declared land annual use and field controls, as obtained in the framework of subsidy granting in Slovenia. The results confirm that the proposed combined approach proves efficient to deal with short time series and yields high accuracy rates in monitoring agricultural parcel greenness. As such it can already be introduced to help the process of agricultural land use control within certain CAP activities in the preparation and adaptation phase.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 4407-4419 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Olsen ◽  
S. Miehe ◽  
P. Ceccato ◽  
R. Fensholt

Abstract. Most regional scale studies of vegetation in the Sahel have been based on Earth observation (EO) imagery due to the limited number of sites providing continuous and long term in situ meteorological and vegetation measurements. From a long time series of coarse resolution normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data a greening of the Sahel since the 1980s has been identified. However, it is poorly understood how commonly applied remote sensing techniques reflect the influence of extensive grazing (and changes in grazing pressure) on natural rangeland vegetation. This paper analyses the time series of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NDVI metrics by comparing it with data from the Widou Thiengoly test site in northern Senegal. Field data include grazing intensity, end of season standing biomass (ESSB) and species composition from sizeable areas suitable for comparison with moderate – coarse resolution satellite imagery. It is shown that sampling plots excluded from grazing have a different species composition characterized by a longer growth cycle as compared to plots under controlled grazing or communal grazing. Also substantially higher ESSB is observed for grazing exclosures as compared to grazed areas, substantially exceeding the amount of biomass expected to be ingested by livestock for this area. The seasonal integrated NDVI (NDVI small integral; capturing only the signal inherent to the growing season recurrent vegetation), derived using absolute thresholds to estimate start and end of growing seasons, is identified as the metric most strongly related to ESSB for all grazing regimes. However plot-pixel comparisons demonstrate how the NDVI/ESSB relationship changes due to grazing-induced variation in annual plant species composition and the NDVI values for grazed plots are only slightly lower than the values observed for the ungrazed plots. Hence, average ESSB in ungrazed plots since 2000 was 0.93 t ha−1, compared to 0.51 t ha−1 for plots subjected to controlled grazing and 0.49 t ha−1 for communally grazed plots, but the average integrated NDVI values for the same period were 1.56, 1.49, and 1.45 for ungrazed, controlled and communal, respectively, i.e. a much smaller difference. This indicates that a grazing-induced development towards less ESSB and shorter-cycled annual plants with reduced ability to turn additional water in wet years into biomass is not adequately captured by seasonal NDVI metrics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Tahmid Anam Chowdhury ◽  
◽  
Md. Saiful Islam ◽  

Urban developments in the cities of Bangladesh are causing the depletion of natural land covers over the past several decades. One of the significant implications of the developments is a change in Land Surface Temperature (LST). Through LST distribution in different Land Use Land Cover (LULC) and a statistical association among LST and biophysical indices, i.e., Urban Index (UI), Bare Soil Index (BI), Normalized Difference Builtup Index (NDBI), Normalized Difference Bareness Index (NDBaI), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI), this paper studied the implications of LULC change on the LST in Mymensingh city. Landsat TM and OLI/TIRS satellite images were used to study LULC through the maximum likelihood classification method and LSTs for 1989, 2004, and 2019. The accuracy of LULC classifications was 84.50, 89.50, and 91.00 for three sampling years, respectively. From 1989 to 2019, the area and average LST of the built-up category has been increased by 24.99% and 7.6ºC, respectively. Compared to vegetation and water bodies, built-up and barren soil regions have a greater LST each year. A different machine learning method was applied to simulate LULC and LST in 2034. A remarkable change in both LULC and LST was found through this simulation. If the current changing rate of LULC continues, the built-up area will be 59.42% of the total area, and LST will be 30.05ºC on average in 2034. The LST in 2034 will be more than 29ºC and 31ºC in 59.64% and 23.55% areas of the city, respectively.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 897 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luana Portz ◽  
Laurindo Antonio Guasselli ◽  
Iran Carlos Stalliviere Corrêa

Neste estudo foram analisadas as variações espaciais e temporais do Índice de Vegetação por Diferença Normalizada (NDVI) na lagoa do Peixe, no litoral do Rio Grande do Sul. Para alcançar o objetivo proposto foram utilizadas imagens de satélite Landsat TM5, entre os anos de 1986 e 2009, seguindo os procedimentos de elaboração de mosaico das cenas, verificação de campo, geração das imagens de NDVI, análise de dados de precipitação acumulada, geração dos mapas finais e análise qualitativa dos resultados obtidos. Os resultados obtidos com a geração de imagens de NDVI mostraram que a análise espaço-temporal associada aos dados de precipitação fornecem informações de valiosa importância sobre a dinâmica da lagoa do Peixe. A importância  do NDVI neste estudo se destaca pelo contraste existente entre água e vegetação, realçando os diferentes níveis de água sobre os bancos vegetados presentes na borda oeste da lagoa. Estes bancos são um importante controlador da dinâmica de circulação lagunar, onde em períodos de seca ocorre a compartimentação da lagoa, enquanto que em épocas de grande precipitação e acumulação de água estes bancos ficam submersos. Palavras-chave: Landsat TM, série temporal, Parque Nacional.  Spatial and Temporal Variation of NDVI in the Peixe Lagoon, RS  ABSTRACTThis paper analyzed the spatial and temporal variation of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in the Peixe lagoon. To reach the purpose,  the NDVI time-series were collected from the study area between year 1986 and 2009 derived from Landsat TM5 satellite. The adopted methodology may be subdivided into the following steps: mosaic of scenes, fild verification, generation of NDVI time-series and qualitative analysis, in addition, it was complemented with rainfall analysis.  The results obtained with the NDVI time-series associated with the rainfall analysis data provide valuable information about the environmental dynamics. The importance of NDVI in this work is given by the contrast between water and vegetation, highlighting the different levels of water over vegetated banks present on the western edge of the lagoon. These banks are an important driver circulation in the lagoon, where in periods of drought occurs the partitioning of the lagoo, while in periods of high precipitation and accumulation of water they are submerged.    Keywords: Landsat TM, time-series, National Park.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document