Atmospherically resistant vegetation index (ARVI) for EOS-MODIS

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 30; no. 2; pp. 261 - 270
• Main Authors: Kaufman, Y.J., Tanre, D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Legacy CDMS IEEE 01-03-1992; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: 440700 - Geophysical & Meteorological Instrumentation- (1990-); 540210 - Environment, Terrestrial- Basic Studies- (1990-); AEROSOLS; Animal, plant and microbial ecology; Arithmetic; Atmospheric modeling; Biological and medical sciences; COLLOIDS; Computational modeling; COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION; DISPERSIONS; Dynamic range; Earth Observing System; Earth Resources And Remote Sensing; ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS; ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects. Techniques; LANDSAT SATELLITES; MEASURING INSTRUMENTS; MODIS; OPTICAL PROPERTIES; OTHER INSTRUMENTATION; PHYSICAL PROPERTIES; PLANTS; REFLECTIVITY; REMOTE SENSING; SATELLITES; Sensor systems; SIMULATION; SOILS; SOLS; SURFACE PROPERTIES; Teledetection and vegetation maps; Vegetation; Vegetation dynamics; Simulation model; Vegetation index; Remote sensing
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/36.134076

An atmospherically resistant vegetation index (ARVI) is proposed and developed for remote sensing of vegetation from the Earth Observing System (EOS) MODIS sensor. The same index can be used for remote sensing from Landsat TM and the EOS-HIRIS sensor. The index takes advantage of the presence of the blue channel (0.47.+or-0.01 mu m) in the MODIS sensor, in addition to the red (0.66+or-0.025 mu m) and the near-IR (0.865+or-0.02 mu m) channels that compose the present normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The resistance of the ARVI to atmospheric effects (in comparison to the NDVI) is accomplished by a self-correction process for the atmospheric effect on the red channel, using the difference in the radiance between the blue and the red channels to correct the radiance in the red channel. Simulations using radiative transfer computations on arithmetic and natural surface spectra, for various atmospheric conditions, show that ARVI has a similar dynamic range to the NDVI, but is, on average, four times less sensitive to atmospheric effects than the NDVI.< >