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Drought Monitoring - Introduction
This site has been established to monitor drought and the stress on range plants within the Intermountain Region of the US Forest Service (USFS) by climatic and biological causes.
Data was collected from satellite imagery acquired from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard the NASA Terra system.
This monitoring makes use of a Biomass Stress Indices algorithm.
Because the resulting stress indices are a product of the amount of chlorophyll
and green growing material in plants, subsequent comparison of products
over time should yield a representation of total growing plant biomass.
Any reduction of biomass over time may be attributed to a combination
of factors such as plant phenology (growth stages), plant moisture content,
and removal by livestock grazing. Currently these cannot be separated
into any single cause. The data should be used as an indicator and
not a direct measurement. Closer field inspection will be needed
to evaluate specific areas.
Satellite data was compiled at the USFS Remote Sensing Applications Center
in Salt Lake City, Utah. Biomass Stress processing was done at the
USFS Region 4 Headquarters in Ogden Utah.
Drought Monitoring through the Use of Modis Satellite Imagery - Powerpoint (6 megabytes)
| Introduction | R4 Monitoring Maps | U.S. Drought Monitor | NOAA Drought Information Center |
| U of Ariz - Tools | MODIS | AVHRR |
More information...
Questions or comments
about these pages?
Contact Rick Forsman
(801)625-5598
rforsman@fs.fed.us
Number of visitors since May 27, 2003:
US Forest Service - Intermountain Region
Last Modified: Monday, 10 March 2008 at 18:15:53 EDT