ABSTRACT

Accurate and timely prediction of vegetation conditions enhances knowledge-based decision making for drought planning, mitigation, and response. This is very important in countries that are highly dependent on rainfed agriculture. For example, studies show that remote sensing-based observations and vegetation condition prediction have great potential for estimating crop yields (Verdin and Klaver, 2002; Ji and Peters, 2003; Seaquist et al., 2005; Tadesse et al., 2005a, 2008; Funk and Brown, 2006),

4.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 75 4.2 Data and Methods ...........................................................................................77