The impact of soil reflectance on the quantification of the green vegetation fraction from NDVI

The green vegetation fraction (Fg) is an important climate and hydrologic model parameter. A common method to calculate Fg is to create a simple linear mixing model between two NDVI endmembers: bare soil NDVI (NDVI_o) and full vegetation NDVI (NDVI_∞). Usually it is assumed that NDVI_o is close to zero (NDVI_o ∼ 0.05) and is generally chosen from the lowest observed NDVI values. However, the mean soil NDVI computed from 2906 samples is much larger (NDVI = 0.2) and is highly variable (standard deviation = 0.1). We show that the underestimation of NDVI_o yields overestimations of Fg. The largest errors occur in grassland and shrubland areas. Using parameters for NDVI_o and NDVI_∞ derived from global scenes yields overestimations of Fg that are larger than 0.2 for the majority of U.S. land cover types when pixel NDVI values are 0.2 < NDVI_pixel < 0.4. When using conterminous U.S. scenes to derive NDVI_o and NDVI_∞, the overestimation is less (0.10-0.17 for 0.2 < NDVI_pixel < 0.4). As a result, parts of the conterminous U.S. are affected at different times of the year depending on the local seasonal NDVI cycle. We propose using global databases of NDVI_o along with information on historical NDVI_pixel values to compute a statistically most-likely estimate of Fg. Using in situ measurements made at the Sevilleta LTER, we show that this approach yields better estimates of Fg than using global invariant NDVI_o values estimated from whole scenes. At the two studied sites, the Fg estimate was adjusted by 52% at the grassland and 86% at the shrubland. More significant advances will require information on spatial distribution of soil reflectance.