Spatio-temporal reconstruction of air temperature maps and their application to estimate rice growing season heat accumulation using multi-temporal MODIS data

The accumulation of thermal time usually represents the local heat resources to drive crop growth.Maps of temperature-based agro-meteorological indices are commonly generated by the spatial interpolation of data collected from meteorological stations with coarse geographic continuity.To solve the critical problems of estimating air temperature(T a) and filling in missing pixels due to cloudy and low-quality images in growing degree days(GDDs) calculation from remotely sensed data,a novel spatio-temporal algorithm for T a estimation from Terra and Aqua moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer(MODIS) data was proposed.This is a preliminary study to calculate heat accumulation,expressed in accumulative growing degree days(AGDDs) above 10 ℃,from reconstructed T a based on MODIS land surface temperature(LST) data.The verification results of maximum T a,minimum T a,GDD,and AGDD from MODIS-derived data to meteorological calculation were all satisfied with high correlations over 0.01 significant levels.Overall,MODIS-derived AGDD was slightly underestimated with almost 10% relative error.However,the feasibility of employing AGDD anomaly maps to characterize the 2001-2010 spatio-temporal variability of heat accumulation and estimating the 2011 heat accumulation distribution using only MODIS data was finally demonstrated in the current paper.Our study may supply a novel way to calculate AGDD in heat-related study concerning crop growth monitoring,agricultural climatic regionalization,and agro-meteorological disaster detection at the regional scale.

Assessing winter oilseed rape freeze injury based on Chinese HJ remote sensing data

The winter oilseed rape（Brassica napus L.） accounts for about 90% of the total acreage of oilseed rape in China. However, it suffers the risk of freeze injury during the winter. In this study, we used Chinese HJ-1A/1B CCD sensors, which have a revisit frequency of 2 d as well as 30 m spatial resolution, to monitor the freeze injury of oilseed rape. Mahalanobis distance-derived growing regions in a normal year were taken as the benchmark, and a mask method was applied to obtain the growing regions in the 2010–2011 growing season. The normalized difference vegetation index（NDVI） was chosen as the indicator of the degree of damage. The amount of crop damage was determined from the difference in the NDVI before and after the freeze. There was spatial variability in the amount of crop damage, so we examined three factors that may affect the degree of freeze injury： terrain, soil moisture, and crop growth before the freeze. The results showed that all these factors were significantly correlated with freeze injury degree（P0.01, two-tailed）. The damage was generally more serious in low-lying and drought-prone areas; in addition, oilseed rape planted on south- and west-oriented facing slopes and those with luxuriant growth status tended to be more susceptible to freeze injury. Furthermore, land surface temperature（LST） of the coldest day, soil moisture, pre-freeze growth and altitude were in descending order of importance in determining the degree of damage. The findings proposed in this paper would be helpful in understanding the occurrence and severity distribution of oilseed rape freeze injury under certain natural or vegetation conditions, and thus help in mitigation of this kind of meteorological disaster in southern China.