Satellite-derived land surface climate 'signal' for the Midwest U.S.A

As a potential strategy for developing regional Land surface climatologies, a statistical method to estimate the land-cover signal from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVl) is developed and applied to the Midwest U.S.A. summer growing season. The method evaluates the temporal correlation of NDVl for non-consecutive scenes of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) at Local Area Coverage (LAC) resolutions. Conventional mapped data help separate the low frequency variations related to phenology from shorter-term fluctuations involving surface moisture. The land surface signal is more stable temporally when pixel data are aggregated to spatial resolutions commensurate with the Global Area Coverage (GAC) data.