Nurit Agam

Use of NDVI and Land Surface Temperature for Drought Assessment: Merits and Limitations

Abstract A large number of water- and climate-related applications, such as drought monitoring, are based on spaceborne-derived relationships between land surface temperature (LST) and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The majority of these applications rely on the existence of a negative slope between the two variables, as identified in site- and time-specific studies. The current paper investigates the generality of the LST–NDVI relationship over a wide range of moisture and climatic/radiation regimes encountered over the North American continent (up to 60°N) during the summer growing season (April–September). Information on LST and NDVI was obtained from long-term (21 years) datasets acquired with the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR). It was found that when water is the limiting factor for vegetation growth (the typical situation for low latitudes of the study area and during the midseason), the LST–NDVI correlation is negative. However, when energy is the limiting fact...

Evaluating water stress in irrigated olives: correlation of soil water status, tree water status, and thermal imagery

Irrigation of olive orchards is challenged to optimize both yields and oil quality. Best management practices for olive irrigation will likely depend on the ability to maintain mild to moderate levels of water stress during at least some parts of the growing season. We examined a number of soil, plant and remote sensing parameters for evaluating water stress in bearing olive (var. Barnea) trees in Israel. The trees were irrigated with five water application treatments (30, 50, 75, 100 and 125% of potential evapotranspiration) and the measurements of soil water content and potential, mid-day stem water potential, and stomatal resistance were taken. Remote thermal images of individual trees were used to alternatively measure average canopy temperature and to calculate the tree’s crop water stress index (CWSI), testing empirical and analytical approaches. A strong non-linear response showing similar trends and behavior was evident in soil and plant water status measurements as well as in the CWSI, with decreasing rates of change at the higher irrigation application levels. No statistically significant difference was found between the analytical and the empirical CWSI, suggesting that the relative simplicity of the analytical method would make it preferable in practical applications.

Comments on the use of the Vegetation Health Index over Mongolia

The Vegetation Health index (VHI) is based on a combination of products extracted from vegetation signals, namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and from the brightness temperatures, both derived from the NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor. VH users rely on a strong inverse correlation between NDVI and land surface temperature, since increasing land temperatures are assumed to act negatively on vegetation vigour and consequently to cause stress. This Letter explores this hypothesis with data from Mongolia incorporating information from six different ecosystems. It was found that the northern ecosystems are characterized by positive correlations, implying that rising temperature favourably influences vegetation activity. It is concluded that the VHI should be used with caution, especially in high latitude regions.

Diurnal Water Content Changes in the Bare Soil of a Coastal Desert

Abstract The deposition of dew is a common meteorological phenomenon that has been recognized as an important ecosystem element, especially in arid areas. There is some evidence that indicates that there is an increase in the water content of the topsoil during nights in which no dew deposition was observed. The purpose of this study is to describe the daily pattern of changes in water content in the upper soil layers and to identify the mechanism by which water is added to the soil (deposition or direct absorption). Moreover, the gains in soil water content during the night are compared to the dew amounts recorded by the Hiltner balance, and the losses and gains of water in terms of easily measurable environmental parameters are parameterized. Nine 24-h field campaigns took place during the dry season of 2002. During each campaign, the 100-mm topsoil was sampled hourly, and water content at 10-mm increments was obtained. Micrometeorological measurements included incoming and reflected shortwave radiation...

Application of the Priestley-Taylor approach in a two-source surface energy balance model.

The Priestley‐Taylor (PT) approximation for computing evapotranspiration was initially developed for conditions of a horizontally uniform saturated surface sufficiently extended to obviate any significant advection of energy. Nevertheless, the PT approach has been effectively implemented within the framework of a thermal-based two-source model (TSM) of the surface energy balance, yielding reasonable latent heat flux estimates over a range in vegetative cover and climate conditions. In the TSM, however, the PT approach is applied only to the canopy component of the latent heat flux, which may behave more conservatively than the bulk (soil 1 canopy) system. The objective of this research is to investigate the response of the canopy and bulk PT parameters to varying leaf area index (LAI) and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) in both natural and agricultural vegetated systems, to better understand the utility and limitations of this approximation within the context of the TSM. Micrometeorological flux measurements collected at multiple sites under a wide range of atmospheric conditions were used to implement an optimization scheme, assessing the value of the PT parameter for best performance of the TSM. Overall, the findings suggest that within the context of the TSM, the optimal canopy PT coefficient for agricultural crops appears to have a fairly conservative value of ;1.2 except when under very high vapor pressure deficit (VPD) conditions, when its value increases. For natural vegetation (primarily grasslands), the optimal canopy PT coefficient assumed lower values on average (;0.9) and dropped even further at high values of VPD. This analysis provides some insight as to why the PT approach, initially developed for regional estimates of potential evapotranspiration, can be used successfully in the TSM scheme to yield reliable heat flux estimates over a variety of land cover types.

Utility of thermal sharpening over Texas high plains irrigated agricultural fields

[1] Irrigated crop production in the Texas high plains (THP) is dependent on water extracted from the Ogallala Aquifer, an area suffering from sever water shortage. Water management in this area is therefore highly important. Thermal satellite imagery at high temporal (� daily) and high spatial (� 100 m) resolutions could provide important surface boundary conditions for vegetation stress and water use monitoring, mainly through energy balance models such as DisALEXI. At present, however, no satellite platform collects such high spatiotemporal resolution data. The objective of this study is to examine the utility of an image sharpening technique (TsHARP) for retrieving land surface temperature at high spatial resolution (down to 60 m) from moderate spatial resolution (1 km) imagery, which is typically available at higher (� daily) temporal frequency. A simulated sharpening experiment was applied to Landsat 7 imagery collected over the THP in September 2002 to examine its utility over both agricultural and natural vegetation cover. The Landsat thermal image was aggregated to 960 m resolution and then sharpened to its native resolution of 60 m and to various intermediate resolutions. The algorithm did not provide any measurable improvement in estimating high-resolution temperature distributions over natural land cover. In contrast, TsHARP was shown to retrieve highresolution temperature information with good accuracy over much of the agricultural area within the scene. However, in recently irrigated fields, TsHARP could not reproduce the temperature patterns. Therefore we conclude that TsHARP is not an adequate substitute for 100-m-scale observations afforded by the current Landsat platforms. Should the thermal imager be removed from follow-on Landsat platforms, we will lose valuable capacity to monitor water use at the field scale, particularly in many agricultural regions where the typical field size is � 100 � 100 m. In this scenario, sharpened thermal imagery from instruments like MODIS or VIIRS would be the suboptimal alternative.

Assessing vegetation condition in the presence of biomass burning smoke by applying the Aerosol-free Vegetation Index (AFRI) on MODIS images

Vegetation indices (VIs) such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) are widely used for assessing vegetation cover and condition. One of the NDVIs significant disadvantages is its sensitivity to aerosols in the atmosphere, hence several atmospherically resistant VIs were formulated using the difference in the radiance between the blue and the red spectral bands. The state‐of‐the‐art atmospherically resistant VI, which is a standard Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) product, together with the NDVI, is the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI). A different approach introduced the Aerosol‐free Vegetation Index (AFRI) that is based on the correlation between the shortwave infrared (SWIR) and the visible red bands. The AFRI main advantage is in penetrating an opaque atmosphere influenced by biomass burning smoke, without the need for explicit correction for the aerosol effect. The objective of this research was to compare the performance of these three VIs under smoke conditions. The AFRI was applied to the 2.1 µm SWIR channel of the MODIS sensor onboard the Earth Observing System (EOS) Terra and Aqua satellites in order to assess its functionality on these imaging platforms. The AFRI performance was compared with those of NDVI and EVI. All VIs were calculated on images with and without present smoke, using the surface‐reflectance MODIS product, for three case studies of fires in Arizona, California, and Zambia. The MODIS Fire Product was embedded on the images in order to identify the exact location of the active fires. Although good correlations were observed between all VIs in the absence of smoke (in the Arizona case R 2 = 0.86, 0.77, 0.88 for the NDVI–EVI, AFRI–EVI, and AFRI–NDVI, respectively) under smoke conditions a high correlation was maintained between the NDVI and the EVI, while low correlations were found for the AFRI–EVI and AFRI–NDVI (0.21 and 0.16, for the Arizona case, respectively). A time series of MODIS images recorded over Zambia during the summer of 2000 was tested and showed high NDVI fluctuations during the study period due to oscillations in aerosol optical thickness values despite application of aerosol corrections on the images. In contrast, the AFRI showed smoother variations and managed to better assess the vegetation condition. It is concluded that, beneath the biomass burning smoke, the AFRI is more effective than the EVI in observing the vegetation conditions.

Development of a Land Surface Model Including Evaporation and Adsorption Processes in the Soil for the Land–Air Exchange in Arid Regions

Abstract A one-dimensional soil model has been developed to better predict heat and water exchanges in arid and semiarid regions. New schemes to calculate evaporation and adsorption in the soil were incorporated in the model. High performance of the model was confirmed by comparison of predicted surface fluxes, soil temperature, and volumetric soil water content with those measured in the Negev Desert, Israel. Evaporation and adsorption processes in the soil have a large impact on the heat and water exchange between the atmosphere and land surface and are necessary to accurately predict them. Numerical experiments concerning the drying process of soil are performed using the presented model and a commonly used land surface model. The results indicated that, when the dry soil layer (DSL) develops, water vapor flux to the atmosphere is caused by evaporation in the soil rather than evaporation at the ground surface. Moreover, the adsorption process has some impact on the water and heat balance at the ground ...

Spatial and diurnal below canopy evaporation in a desert vineyard: Measurements and modeling

Evaporation from the soil surface (E) can be a significant source of water loss in arid areas. In sparsely vegetated systems, E is expected to be a function of soil, climate, irrigation regime, precipitation patterns, and plant canopy development and will therefore change dynamically at both daily and seasonal time scales. The objectives of this research were to quantify E in an isolated, drip-irrigated vineyard in an arid environment and to simulate below canopy E using the HYDRUS (2-D/3-D) model. Specific focus was on variations of E both temporally and spatially across the inter-row. Continuous above canopy measurements, made in a commercial vineyard, included evapotranspiration, solar radiation, air temperature and humidity, and wind speed and direction. Short-term intensive measurements below the canopy included actual and potential E and solar radiation along transects between adjacent vine-rows. Potential and actual E below the canopy were highly variable, both diurnally and with distance from the vine-row, as a result of shading and distinct wetted areas typical to drip irrigation. While the magnitude of actual E was mostly determined by soil water content, diurnal patterns depended strongly on position relative to the vine-row due to variable shading patterns. HYDRUS (2-D/3-D) successfully simulated the magnitude, diurnal patterns, and spatial distribution of E, including expected deviations as a result of variability in soil saturated hydraulic conductivity.

Diurnal emissivity dynamics in bare versus biocrusted sand dunes

Land surface emissivity (LSE) in the thermal infrared depends mainly on the ground cover and on changes in soil moisture. The LSE is a critical variable that affects the prediction accuracy of geophysical models requiring land surface temperature as an input, highlighting the need for an accurate derivation of LSE. The primary aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that diurnal changes in emissivity, as detected from space, are larger for areas mostly covered by biocrusts (composed mainly of cyanobacteria) than for bare sand areas. The LSE dynamics were monitored from geostationary orbit by the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) over a sand dune field in a coastal desert region extending across both sides of the Israel-Egypt political borderline. Different land-use practices by the two countries have resulted in exposed, active sand dunes on the Egyptian side (Sinai), and dunes stabilized by biocrusts on the Israeli side (Negev). Since biocrusts adsorb more moisture from the atmosphere than bare sand does, and LSE is affected by the soil moisture, diurnal fluctuations in LSE were larger for the crusted dunes in the 8.7 μm channel. This phenomenon is attributed to water vapor adsorption by the sand/biocrust particles. The results indicate that LSE is sensitive to minor changes in soil water content caused by water vapor adsorption and can, therefore, serve as a tool for quantifying this effect, which has a large spatial impact. As biocrusts cover vast regions in deserts worldwide, this discovery has repercussions for LSE estimations in deserts around the globe, and these LSE variations can potentially have considerable effects on geophysical models from local to regional scales.