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- Arctic tundra ecosystems (1)
- Bayesian classification (1)
- Sentinel-2 MSI (1)
- alaskan tundra (1)
- carbon dioxide exchange (1)
- cirrus detection (1)
- climate-change (1)
- cloud detection (1)
- decision trees (1)
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High-latitude treeless ecosystems represent spatially highly heterogeneous landscapes with small net carbon fluxes and a short growing season. Reliable observations and process understanding are critical for projections of the carbon balance of the climate-sensitive tundra. Space-borne remote sensing is the only tool to obtain spatially continuous and temporally resolved information on vegetation greenness and activity in remote circumpolar areas. However, confounding effects from persistent clouds, low sun elevation angles, numerous lakes, widespread surface inundation, and the sparseness of the vegetation render it highly challenging. Here, we conduct an extensive analysis of the timing of peak vegetation productivity as shown by satellite observations of complementary indicators of plant greenness and photosynthesis. We choose to focus on productivity during the peak of the growing season, as it importantly affects the total annual carbon uptake. The suite of indicators are as follows: (1) MODIS-based vegetation indices (VIs) as proxies for the fraction of incident photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) that is absorbed (fPAR), (2) VIs combined with estimates of PAR as a proxy of the total absorbed radiation (APAR), (3) sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) serving as a proxy for photosynthesis, (4) vegetation optical depth (VOD), indicative of total water content and (5) empirically upscaled modelled gross primary productivity (GPP). Averaged over the pan-Arctic we find a clear order of the annual peak as APAR ≦ GPP<SIF<VIs/VOD. SIF as an indicator of photosynthesis is maximised around the time of highest annual temperatures. The modelled GPP peaks at a similar time to APAR. The time lag of the annual peak between APAR and instantaneous SIF fluxes indicates that the SIF data do contain information on light-use efficiency of tundra vegetation, but further detailed studies are necessary to verify this. Delayed peak greenness compared to peak photosynthesis is consistently found across years and land-cover classes. A particularly late peak of the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) in regions with very small seasonality in greenness and a high amount of lakes probably originates from artefacts. Given the very short growing season in circumpolar areas, the average time difference in maximum annual photosynthetic activity and greenness or growth of 3 to 25 days (depending on the data sets chosen) is important and needs to be considered when using satellite observations as drivers in vegetation models.
Classification of clouds, cirrus, snow, shadows and clear sky areas is a crucial step in the pre-processing of optical remote sensing images and is a valuable input for their atmospheric correction. The Multi-Spectral Imager on board the Sentinel-2's of the Copernicus program offers optimized bands for this task and delivers unprecedented amounts of data regarding spatial sampling, global coverage, spectral coverage, and repetition rate. Efficient algorithms are needed to process, or possibly reprocess, those big amounts of data. Techniques based on top-of-atmosphere reflectance spectra for single-pixels without exploitation of external data or spatial context offer the largest potential for parallel data processing and highly optimized processing throughput. Such algorithms can be seen as a baseline for possible trade-offs in processing performance when the application of more sophisticated methods is discussed. We present several ready-to-use classification algorithms which are all based on a publicly available database of manually classified Sentinel-2A images. These algorithms are based on commonly used and newly developed machine learning techniques which drastically reduce the amount of time needed to update the algorithms when new images are added to the database. Several ready-to-use decision trees are presented which allow to correctly label about 91% of the spectra within a validation dataset. While decision trees are simple to implement and easy to understand, they offer only limited classification skill. It improves to 98% when the presented algorithm based on the classical Bayesian method is applied. This method has only recently been used for this task and shows excellent performance concerning classification skill and processing performance. A comparison of the presented algorithms with other commonly used techniques such as random forests, stochastic gradient descent, or support vector machines is also given. Especially random forests and support vector machines show similar classification skill as the classical Bayesian method.