A comparative study for reconstructing a high-quality NDVI time series data derived from MODIS surface reflectance

Abstract

: A comparative study was conducted for alternative consecutive procedures of detection of cloud-contaminated pixels and gap-filling and smoothing of time-series data to produce high-quality gapless satellite vegetation index (i.e. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, NDVI). Performances of five alternative methods for detecting cloud contaminations were tested with ground-observed cloudiness data. The data gap was filled with a simple linear interpolation and then, it was applied two alternative smoothing methods (i.e. Savitzky-Golay and Wavelet transform). Moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) data were used in this study. Among the alternative cloud detection methods, a criterion of MODIS Band 3 reflectance over 10% showed best accuracy with an agreement rate of 85%, which was followed by criteria of MODIS Quality assessment (82%) and Band 3 reflectance over 20% (81%), respectively. In smoothing process, the Savitzky-Golay filter was better performed to retain original NDVI patterns than the wavelet transform. This study demonstrated an operational framework of gapdetection, filling, and smoothing to produce high-quality satellite vegetation index.