Document Type

Article

Publication Version

Version of Record

Publication Date

8-2016

Keywords

tropical rainforest phenology, Congo basin, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI)

Description

The seasonal and interannual dynamics of tropical rainforests play a critical role in the global carbon cycle and climate change. This paper retrieved and compared land surface phenology from observations acquired by the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) onboard geostationary satellites and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on polar-orbiting satellites over the Congo Basin. To achieve this,we first retrieved canopy greenness cycles (CGCs) and their transition timing from two-band enhanced vegetation index (EVI2) derived from SEVIRI and MODIS data between 2006 and 2013.We then assessed the influences of SEVIRI and MODIS data quality on the reconstruction of the EVI2 temporal trajectory, the detection of the CGC onset and end timing, and the total number of successful CGC retrievals. The significance of influences was determined using the one-tailed two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. The results indicate that diurnal SEVIRI observations greatly increased the probability of capturing cloud-free daily EVI2 in the rainforest-dominated region of the Congo Basin, where the proportion of good quality (PGQ) observations during a CGC was up to 80% higher than that from MODIS. As a result, the double annual CGCs of the Congo Basin rainforests were well identified from SEVIRI but sparsely detected from MODIS, whereas the single annual CGC in the savanna-dominated northern and southern Congo Basin was successfully retrieved from both SEVIRI and MODIS. Moreover, the decreases of PGQ in an EVI2 time series were found to significantly increase the uncertainties of retrieved phenological timings and increase the probabilities of CGC retrieval failures.

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions On Geoscience and Remote Sensing

Volume

54

Issue

8

First Page

4867

Last Page

4881

DOI of Published Version

10.1109/TGRS.2016.2552462

Pages

15

Format

application/pdf

Language

en

Publisher

IEEE

Rights

Works produced within the official duties of an employee of the U.S. Government are not subject to copyright within the U.S. Not subject to U.S. copyright protection.

Comments

This article appeared in IEEE Transactions On Geoscience and Remote Sensing (2016) 54:8, http://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2016.2552462

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