Monitoring Vegetation Water Content Using Microwave Vegetation Indices

Effectively monitoring vegetation water is essential to improve our understanding of agriculture and hydrology. Vegetation water content is often estimated using vegetation indices derived from optical satellite sensors. In this study, we introduced the new microwave vegetation indices (MVIs) and derived the new MVIs using observation from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E). To demonstrate the potential of the proposed MVIs, we compared them with vegetation water content which were obtained using ground based observations of vegetation water content and reflectance from a MultiSpectral Radiometer (MSR) during the National Airborne Field Experiment 2006 (NAFE´06), as well as the coincident Landsat 5 TM data. The estimated vegetation water content were averaged and compared with daily MVIs derived from AMSR-E on EASE-GRID pixels. The results of comparison between the MVIs and crop water content on EASE-GRID pixels demonstrated that the MVIs could be used to monitor the vegetation water content, which suggests additional all weather information and a potential linkage of the two data sources. In combination with vegetation indices derived from conventional optical sensor, MVIs provide a possible complementary dataset for monitoring global vegetation from space.