PHENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF NDVI TIME-SERIES DATA ACCORDING TO VEGETATION TYPES USING THE HANTS ALGORITHM

Annual vegetation growth patterns are determined by the intrinsic phenological characteristics of each land cover types. So, if typical growth patterns of each land cover types are well-estimated, and a NDVI time-series data of a certain area is compared to those estimated patterns, we can implement more advanced analyses such as a land surface-type classification or a land surface type change detection. In this study, we utilized Terra MODIS NDVI 250m data and compressed full annual NDVI time series data into several indices using the Harmonic Analysis of Time Series(HANTS) algorithm which extracts the most significant frequencies expected to be presented in the original NDVI time-series data. Then, we found these frequencies patterns, described by amplitude and phase data, were significantly different from each other according to vegetation types and these could be used for land cover classification. However, in spite of the capabilities of the HANTS algorithm for detecting and interpolating cloud-contaminated NDVI values, some distorted NDVI pixels of June, July and August, as well as the long rainy season in Korea, are not properly corrected. In particular, in the case of two or three successive NDVI time-series data, which are severely affected by clouds, the HANTS algorithm outputted wrong results.