On the correlation of indices of vegetation and surface temperature over south-eastern Australia

• Published in: International journal of remote sensing 1990-11, Vol.11 (11), p.2113-2120
• Main Authors: SMITH, R. C. G., CHOUDHURY, B. J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agronomy. Soil science and plant productions; Biological and medical sciences; Earth Resources And Remote Sensing; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Generalities. Biometrics, experimentation. Remote sensing; Remote sensing
• ISSN: 0143-1161; 1366-5901
• DOI: 10.1080/01431169008955164

Relationships between radiant surface temperature (T R ) and vegetation indices for scenes with equal areas of forest and agricultural land use were studied using a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) scene during spring and a NOAA-Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) scene during summer. The relationships between TR and the Normalized Difference (ND) index of vegetation for agricultural land use were different from those for forests. At the same T R , the forests had lower near infrared reflectance. This caused the ND of forests to fall below the T R /ND relationships formed by agricultural land use. This difference between forest and agricultural land use did not exist when visible reflectance (VIS) was used as the index of vegetation. When the two land use systems were combined VIS accounted for about 86 per cent of the variance in T R . The slope of the relationships between VIS and T R differed for TM and AVHRR scenes. This was explained by differences in the T R and VIS reflectance of surfaces with near-zero evaporation. These surfaces were predominantly bare soil in the TM scene and senesced vegetation in the AVHRR scene.