Climatological characteristics of NDVI time series: challenges and constraints

Many studies already investigated the impact of climate change and climate variability on vegetation at global and continental scales. Low resolution satellite imagery is one of the main sources of information. In this paper, we describe a strategy to improve the quality of 10-daily time series of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index derived from SPOT-VEGETATION. A specifi c methodology was also defi ned in order to identify optimal test sites for the analysis of climate control on intra-annual dynamic of croplands. Finally two cases studies are presented to illustrate this research and in particular the non linear relationship between NDVI and meteorological parameters during the growing season