Impacts of satellite revisit frequency on spring phenology monitoring of deciduous broad-leaved forests based on vegetation index time series

Abstract

Satellites have different revisit frequencies (i.e., temporal resolutions), ranging from daily to monthly. The satellite revisit frequencies suitable for accurately monitoring the phenology of deciduous broad-leaved forests (DBF) are not well-known. To fill this knowledge gap, this study used MODIS Daily Nadir BRDF-Adjusted images to simulate EVI time series with a wide range of temporal resolutions from daily to 52 days, to investigate the impacts of satellite revisit frequency on monitoring spatial and temporal patterns of spring phenology, i.e., the start of season (SOS), of DBF in North America. Then, these EVI time series were used to extract SOS by two common phenology extraction methods (i.e., relative threshold and curvature methods). Our results reveal that 1) low temporal resolutions cannot accurately reconstruct real vegetation growth profile, which generally causes a false early SOS detection, 2) the impact of temporal resolutions is nonlinear. The accuracy of SOS detection from data with relatively high frequencies (e.g., 7 days) is only slightly lower than that from daily time series but the accuracy decreases largely with low frequencies, and 3) validation with ground observations from PhenoCam Network stations and an experiment using three real satellite datasets (i.e., MODIS, Landsat 8, and Sentinel-2) confirm the findings from our simulation study. This study suggests that satellites with medium temporal resolutions, such as Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8, could extract reliable phenology metrics in non-cloudy regions.