Mapping evapotranspiration of wheat and corn using MODIS data with improved resolution

Abstract

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data are widely used to compute regional evapotranspiration (ET) at 1000-m spatial resolution. However, due to the fact that the village densities in most counties in North China Plain are higher than 0.5 per km2, the crop ET mapping at 1000-m resolution computed using MODIS data often fails to differentiate the crop field from the residential area, thus resulted in inaccurate ET estimation. In this study, we analyzed relationship between crop ET and MODIS-normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and deduced ET equations to calculating winter wheat and summer corn ET from NDVI. The equations were tested using measured data and proved that they are reliable. The equations were applied using MODIS 250 m spatial resolution NDVI and mapped crop ET at 250 m resolution. Compared with ET map from high resolution Landsat, the improved resolution ET map can described the spatial variations of regional crop ET in a similar pattern.