Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ASSESSMENT OF LAND SURFACE TEMPERATURE AND NDVI FOR SURFACE ENERGY BALANCE STUDIES

P. Thanabalan and R. Vidhya

Abstract

The quantification mapping and monitoring of biomass using land surface temperature and Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) which are associated with hydrological cycle is an effieicient use for terrestrial ecosystem, with impact on actual evapotranspiration. As this should be reflected in the partition of surface energy fluxes which helps to monitor land condition. In this study we set a simple operation for calculating energy fluxes in the Indian context. The monthly satellite gridded datasets of MODIS Land Surface Temperature (LST) and MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the years 2009 to 2013 is used for this study. The obtained data MODIS land surface temperature (LST), vegetation index (NDVI) has been developed to estimate soil heat flux and it is sensible for finding soil moisture status. The soil heat flux is derived by incoming solar radiation and long wave irradiation to the outgoing terrestrial infrared radiation (G/Rn) from LST and NDVI. The spatial patterns for the ratio (G/Rn) (soil heat flux) are coherent with the surface temperature. The physical principles and status of current retrieval method are summarized. The comparison shows that the soil heat flux is one of the important component for surface energy balance studies.