Improved global 250 m 8-day NDVI and EVI products from 2000–2021 using the LSTM model

Abstract

Satellite vegetation index (VI) products, such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI), have been widely used. However, they are severely contaminated by clouds and other factors and provide false signals of the surface vegetation conditions. In this study, the new global seamless 250 m, eight-day NDVI and EVI products from 2000–2021 were developed from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) surface reflectance data using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network method. High-quality globally representative time series VI samples were constructed to train the model using a combination of the Savitzky-Golay filter (SG), Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) leaf area index (LAI) fitting and upper envelope methods. To evaluate the proposed method and the 250 m VI products, the MODIS VI product (MOD13Q1) was used for the inter-comparisons using four widely used VI reconstruction methods. Assuming that the MODIS VI data of high quality represents the true values, the root mean square error (RMSE) for NDVI and EVI generated by the LSTM model are 0.0734 and 0.0509, respectively.