Vegetation Index

Team Members: Yunyue Yu, Corinne Carter, and Zhangyan Jiang

Background

Vegetation Index (VI) is a spectral transformation of two or more bands designed to enhance the contribution of vegetation properties and allow reliable spatial and temporal inter- comparisons of terrestrial photosynthetic activity and canopy structural variations, monitor and characterize terrestrial landscapes.  VI is related to absorption of photosynthetically active radiation by vegetation and correlate with biomass or primary productivity. It is a robust empirical measure of vegetation activity at the land surface and has been widely used to study the spatial and temporal pattern of vegetation conditions at large scale with the objective to understand the role of terrestrial vegetation in regional and global processes, such as global carbon and nitrogen cycle, global hydrological cycle and global energy cycle.

Data access

The data are available to the public via NOAA CLASS, and please refer to the instruction for details on how to order and download the data .