Normalized Difference Vegetation Index

The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is a simple graphical indicator that can be used to analyze remote sensing measurements, typically, but not necessarily, from a space platform, and assess whether the target being observed contains live green vegetation or not. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is a simple graphical indicator that can be used to analyze remote sensing measurements, typically, but not necessarily, from a space platform, and assess whether the target being observed contains live green vegetation or not. The exploration of outer space started in earnest with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. This was the first man-made satellite orbiting the Earth. Subsequent successful launches, both in the Soviet Union (e.g., the Sputnik and Cosmos programs), and in the U.S. (e.g., the Explorer program), quickly led to the design and operation of dedicated meteorological satellites. These are orbiting platforms embarking instruments specially designed to observe the Earth's atmosphere and surface with a view to improve weather forecasting. Starting in 1960, the TIROS series of satellites embarked television cameras and radiometers. This was later (1964 onwards) followed by the Nimbus satellites and the family of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) platforms. The latter measures the reflectance of the planet in red and near-infrared bands, as well as in the thermal infrared. In parallel, NASA developed the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), which became the precursor to the Landsat program. These early sensors had minimal spectral resolution, but tended to include bands in the red and near-infrared, which are useful to distinguish vegetation and clouds, amongst other targets. With the launch of the first ERTS satellite – which was soon to be renamed Landsat 1 – on July 23, 1972 with its MultiSpectral Scanner (MSS) NASA funded a number of investigations to determine its capabilities for Earth remote sensing. One of those early studies was directed toward examining the spring vegetation green-up and subsequent summer and fall dry-down (the so-called “vernal advancement and retrogradation”) throughout the north to south expanse of the Great Plains region of the central U.S. This region covered a wide range of latitudes from the southern tip of Texas to the U.S.-Canada border, which resulted in a wide range of solar zenith angles at the time of the satellite observations. The researchers for this Great Plains study (PhD student Donald Deering and his advisor Dr. Robert Hass) found that their ability to correlate, or quantify, the biophysical characteristics of the rangeland vegetation of this region from the satellite spectral signals was confounded by these differences in solar zenith angle across this strong latitudinal gradient. With the assistance of a resident mathematician (Dr. John Schell), they studied solutions to this dilemma and subsequently developed the ratio of the difference of the red and infrared radiances over their sum as a means to adjust for or “normalize” the effects of the solar zenith angle. Originally, they called this ratio the “Vegetation Index” (and another variant, the square-root transformation of the difference-sum ratio, the “Transformed Vegetation Index”); but as several other remote sensing researchers were identifying the simple red/infrared ratio and other spectral ratios as the “vegetation index,” they eventually began to identify the difference/sum ratio formulation as the normalized difference vegetation index. The earliest reported use of NDVI in the Great Plains study was in 1973 by Rouse et al. (Dr. John Rouse was the Director of the Remote Sensing Center of Texas A&M University where the Great Plains study was conducted). However, they were preceded in formulating a normalized difference spectral index by Kriegler et al. in 1969. Soon after the launch of ERTS-1 (Landsat-1), Compton Tucker of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center produced a series of early scientific journal articles describing uses of the NDVI.