Land cover monitoring in Asia by NOAA GVI data

NOAA/AVHRR Global Vegetation Index (GVI) data of Asia in 1983 and 1987 were used to evaluate their usefulness for global land cover monitoring. Color composite images of monthly GVI data and color composite images of principal components from 12 successive monthly GVI data were found to be useful for visual interpretation of seasonal vegetation dynamics. The results of cluster analysis applied to monthly GVI data for a one‐year period, indicate that unsupervised classification method is useful for global or continental land cover classification without ground truth. In order to detect land cover changes, the difference between the 1983 and 1987 12‐month GVI data was calculated. The results show that it is difficult to detect land cover changes due to cloud contamination in monthly GVI data and poor registration of GVI products.