• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.94-100
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• 2008

Recently, global warming for climate system is a crucial issue over the world and it brings about severe climate change, abnormal temperature, a downpour, a drought, and so on. Especially, a drought over the earth surface accelerates desertification which has been advanced over the several years mainly originated from a climatic change. The objective of this study is to detect variation of vegetation water condition around China and Mongolia desert by using satellite data having advantage in observing surface biological system. In this study, we use SPOT/VEGETATION satellite image to calculate NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) around study area desert for monitoring of status of vegetation characteristics. The vegetation water status index from remotely sensing data is related to desertification since dry vegetation is apt to desertify. We can infer vegetation water status using NDWI acquired by NIR (Near infrared) and SWIR (Short wave infrared) bands from SPOT/VGT. The consequence is that NDWI decreased around desert from 1999 to 2006. The areas that NDWI was decreased are located in the northeast of Mongolian Gobi desert and the southeast of China Taklamakan desert.