Atmospherically resistant vegetation index (ARVI) for EOS-MODIS

An atmospherically resistant vegetation index (ARVI) is proposed and developed for remote sensing of vegetation from the Earth Observing System (EOS) MODIS sensor. The same index can be used for remote sensing from Landsat TM and the EOS-HIRIS sensor. The index takes advantage of the presence of the blue channel (0.47.+or-0.01 mu m) in the MODIS sensor, in addition to the red (0.66+or-0.025 mu m) and the near-IR (0.865+or-0.02 mu m) channels that compose the present normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The resistance of the ARVI to atmospheric effects (in comparison to the NDVI) is accomplished by a self-correction process for the atmospheric effect on the red channel, using the difference in the radiance between the blue and the red channels to correct the radiance in the red channel. Simulations using radiative transfer computations on arithmetic and natural surface spectra, for various atmospheric conditions, show that ARVI has a similar dynamic range to the NDVI, but is, on average, four times less sensitive to atmospheric effects than the NDVI.>