The application of LST/NDVI index for monitoring land surface moisture in semiarid area

]Studies on character and variation of surface moisture become more and more important in land surface process and hydrological modeling. Several methods have been proposed to estimate dry/wet conditions of land surface. However, there are some limitations in these methods. We developed an empirical method of detecting surface moisture condition using surface temperature and vegetation index derived from NOAA/AVHRR data. The results show that vegetation index and surface temperature are important parameters to describe characters of dry/wet condition of land surface. It is obvious that the use of remotely sensed data is potentially of great interest in such context. Therefore, to monitor surface moisture is an important subject of remote sensing. Using this method the surface moisture is detected in the Northwestern Loess plateau of China. The distribution characters of the surface moisture is analyzed as well