STAR - Global Vegetation Health Products

Introduction

Global and Regional Vegetation Health is a NOAA/NESDIS product estimating vegetation conditions and health.

This product contains several Vegetation Health Indices (VHI) derived from the radiance observed by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) onboard the NOAA-7, 9, 11, 14, 16 and 18 afternoon polar-orbiting satellites.

The VHI were produced from the NOAA/NESDIS Global Area Coverage (GAC) data set for the period 1981 to the present. The data and images have 4 km spatial and 7-day composite temporal resolution.

The VHI can be used as proxy data for monitoring vegetation health, drought, moisture and thermal conditions, fire risk, greenness of vegetation cover, vegetation fraction, leave area index, start/end of the growing season, crop and pasture productivity, teleconnection with ENSO, desertification, mosquito-borne diseases, invasive species, ecological resources, land degradation, etc.

The following indices are available:

  • Vegetation Health (VHI)
  • Vegetation Condition Index (VCI)
  • Temperature Condition Index (TCI)
  • Smoothed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (SMN)
  • Smoothed Brightness Temperature (SMT)
  • Fire Risk Index (FRI)
  • Drought
  • Malaria
  • ENSO/Land Ecosystem Interaction
  • Time Series
  • Start of the growing season
  • Ecosystem Resources

(click to view larger image)

 

Key words:

Vegetation Health, Drought, Moisture Conditions, Thermal Conditions, NDVI, Brightness Temperature, Fire risk, Ecosystem Resources

Note:

For NOAA 16 (2001-2005), NOAA18 (May 2005 to present), these satellites were/are in the afternoon orbits. From September 1994 through February 1995, morning satellite orbits were used in the dataset, since afternoon satellite was not available during this period. Therefore, data for this period is not reliable.