A daily gap-free normalized difference vegetation index dataset from 1981 to 2023 in China

Abstract

Long-term, daily, and gap-free Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is of great significance for a better Earth system observation. However, gaps and contamination are quite severe in current daily NDVI datasets. This study developed a daily 0.05° gap-free NDVI dataset from 1981–2023 in China by combining valid data identification and spatiotemporal sequence gap-filling techniques based on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration daily NDVI dataset. The generated NDVI in more than 99.91% of the study area showed an absolute percent bias (|PB|) smaller than 1% compared with the original valid data, with an overall R2 and root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.79 and 0.05, respectively. PB and RMSE between our dataset and the MODIS daily gap-filled NDVI dataset (MCD19A3CMG) during 2000 to 2023 are 7.54% and 0.1, respectively. PB between our dataset and three monthly NDVI datasets (i.e., GIMMS3g, MODIS MOD13C2, and SPOT/PROBA) are only −5.79%, 4.82%, and 2.66%, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first long-term daily gap-free NDVI in China by far.