A spatio-temporal fusion method based on Landsat and MODIS normalized vegetation index data

Abstract. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) can simply and effectively reflect the growth status of plants, and has a linear relationship with vegetation coverage, thus it is an important indicator to identify vegetation growth status and coverage. However, the commonly used MODIS NDVI or Landsat NDVI cannot simultaneously achieve the high temporal and spatial resolution. To this end, we proposed a generic and automatic method to fuse MODIS and Landsat satellite vegetation index (NDVI) into daily high-resolution products which takes time series NDVI data from MODIS/Landsat as input, filters noise pixels, and generates high-resolution and high-frequency products through a fusion process of temporal-linearly interpolation to increase the temporal resolution and spatial filtering to alleviate the blocky artifacts from MODIS pixel border. The fused NDVI maps are visually compared to evaluate the performance of this method, and more quantitative assessment will be continued in the next step. This study can provide important support for large-scale long-term surface vegetation monitoring.