Extension of a drought monitoring and vegetation classification methodology to the western sahel

Abstract

Biomass of growing vegetation over large semiarid regions can be estimated by digital manipulation of data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on NOAA polar orbiting satellites. Successful techniques which have been employed include the Normalized Difference vegetation index and CAUSE. We have extended to the African Sahel a methodology which incorporates both the Normalized Difference and CAUSE procedures for the monitoring of vegetation during drought conditions. Preliminary analysis of color infrared photographs taken on Space Shuttle missions indicates that such photographs can be digitized, registered to maps and other images, and utilized to fill temporal gaps in the historical record of data from unmanned satellites.