Appraisal of Climate Response to Vegetation Indices over Tropical Climate Region in India

Abstract

Extreme climate events are becoming increasingly frequent and intense due to the global climate change. The present investigation aims to ascertain the nature of the climatic variables association with the vegetation variables such as Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). In this study, the impact of climate change with respect to vegetation dynamics has been investigated over the Indian state of Haryana based on the monthly and yearly time-scale during the time period of 2010 to 2020. A time-series analysis of the climatic variables was carried out using the MODIS-derived NDVI and LAI datasets. The spatial mean for all the climatic variables except rainfall (taken sum for rainfall data to compute the accumulated rainfall) and vegetation parameters has been analyzed over the study area on monthly and yearly basis. The liaison of NDVI and LAI with the climatic variables were assessed at multi-temporal scale on the basis of Pearson correlation coefficients. The results obtained from the present investigation reveals that NDVI and LAI has strong significant relationship with climatic variables during the cropping months over study area. In contrast, during the non-cropping months, the relationship weakens but remains significant at the 0.05 significance level. Furthermore, the rainfall and relative humidity depict strong positive relationship with NDVI and LAI. On the other, negative trends were observed in case of other climatic variables due to the limitations of NDVI viz. saturation of values and lower sensitivity at higher LAI. The influence of aerosol optical depth was observed to be much higher on LAI as compared to NDVI. The present findings confirmed that the satellite-derived vegetation indices are significantly useful towards the advancement of knowledge about the association between climate variables and vegetation dynamics.