Tigris Basin Landscapes: Sensitivity of Vegetation Index NDVI to Climate Variability Derived from Observational and Reanalysis Data

Abstract

AbstractThe primary aim of this work is to study the response of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) of landscapes in the lower Tigris basin to current global and regional climate variability presented, respectively, by the global circulation indices and monthly temperatures and precipitation extracted from five observational/reanalysis datasets. The second task is to find the dataset that best reflects the regional vegetation and climate conditions. Comparison of the Köppen–Trewartha bioclimatic landscapes with the positions of botanical districts, land-cover types, and streamflow estimates led to the conclusion that only two datasets correctly describe regional climatic zones. Therefore, searching for the NDVI response to regional climate variability requires the use of normalized analogs of temperatures and precipitations, as well as the Spearman rank correlation. We found that March/April NDVI, as proxies of the maximum biological productivity of the regional landscapes, are strongly correlated with October–March precipitation derived from three datasets and January–March temperatures derived from one dataset. We discovered the significant impact of autumn–winter El Niño–Southern Oscillation and winter Indian Oceanic dipole states on regional weather (e.g., all five recent severe droughts occurred during strong La Niña events). However, the strength of this impact on the vegetation was clearly linked to the zonal landscape type. By selecting pairs of the temperature/precipitation time series that best correlated with NDVI at a given landscape, we have built a synthetic climate dataset. The landscape approach presented in this work can be used to validate the viability of any dataset when assessing the impacts of climate change and variability on weather-dependent components of Earth’s surface.