The precision of the NDVI derived from AVHRR observations

Vegetation studies using NOAA-AVHRR data have tended to focus on the use of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). This unitless index is computed using near-infrared and red reflectances, and thus has both an accuracy and precision. This article reports on a formal statistical framework for assessing the precision of the NDVI derived from NOAA-AVHRR observations. The framework is based on the “best possible” precision concept, which assumes that signal quantization is the only source of observational error. While the radiance resolution of a spectral observation is essentially fixed by the instrument characteristics, the reflectance resolution is the radiance resolution divided by the cosine of the solar zenith angle. Using typical solar zenith angles for AVHRR image acquisitions over Australia, ± 0.01 NDVI units is typically with “best possible” precision attainable in the NDVI, although this degrades significantly over dark targets, and at large solar zenith angles. Transforming the computed NDVI into a single byte for disk storage results in little or no loss of precision. The framework developed in this article can be adapted to estimate the “best possible” precision of other vegetation indices derived using data from other remote sensing satellites.