MODIS fPAR products do not reflect in-situ conditions in a tropical dry forest based on wavelet and cross-wavelet transforms

The fraction of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fPAR) plays a pivotal role in determining the carbon flux in ecosystems. Although the MODIS fPAR product has demonstrated effectiveness in the Northern Hemisphere, its validity still needs to be verified in the context of Tropical Dry Forests (TDFs), which constitute 40% of all tropical forests. This study utilized a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to generate an in-situ Green fPAR dataset at the Santa Rosa National Park Environmental Monitoring Supersite, aiming to validate MODIS fPAR products from 2013 to 2017. This study employs a 2-flux fPAR estimation approach for the in-situ dataset, followed by Savitzky–Golay derivative-based smoothing, univariate-wavelet transforms, and cross-wavelet analysis to compare phenological variables between the in-situ and MODIS fPAR datasets. Our findings reveal a significant temporal disparity between the MODIS fPAR products and ground-based data, with MODIS consistently lagging in detecting the onset of green-up or senescence in TDFs by 18–55 days. However, the annual and inter-seasonal patterns were statistically significant (p < 0.05) and replicated in the MODIS and in-situ datasets. Notably, these patterns deviate during extreme water conditions (droughts and hurricanes), with MODIS underestimating the effects of drought and failing to represent hurricane impact. Furthermore, MODIS fPAR products do not effectively capture small-scale fPAR variations and intra-seasonal differences. Therefore, this study underscores the limited accuracy of MODIS fPAR observations in the context of TDFs. Consequently, caution is warranted when relying on MODIS fPAR products to monitor rapid phenological changes in Tropical Dry Forests.