ABSTRACT
This chapter explore and demonstrate a new technique for deriving microwave vegetation indices (MVIs) using passive microwave radiometer AMSR-E data. Environmental changes and human activities can alter the earth’s ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles, which are critical to sustaining the earth’s living environment. Ecosystems respond continuously to environmental change and variability as well as to numerous disturbances caused by human activities and natural events. The microwave emission model that we used to derive the microwave vegetation indices is the ω–τ model derived from a zeroth-order radiative transfer solution. This model is commonly used to describe microwave signals at low frequencies and employed as an inversion model to retrieve soil moisture information for AMSR-E. To characterize the frequency dependence of surface emission signals with the objective of minimizing the effects of the ground surface emission signals in deriving microwave vegetation indices, first evaluated the characteristics of bare surface emission signals at different AMSR-E frequencies.
