Time Series Analysis of Environmental Ecosystems: case of Morocco

The NOAA AVHRR is considered to be one of the largest image archives ever gathered in the history of remote sensing. Although designed to support meteorological applications, The NOAA AVHRRs ability to produce an index of relatively green vegetation biomass, coupled with its ability to virtually produce cloud-free monthly composites has now yielded an extraordinary time series more than 20 years in length. This book looks at the potential of the archive as a tool for understanding environmental dynamics in arid and semi-arid regions. The principal tool used in this investigation was a Principal Components-based time series analysis (TSA). Using a set of 240 monthly composite multi- band AVHRR images for Morocco, a 20-year time series of monthly NDVI images was analyzed This analysis should help shed some light on this new approach and should be essentially useful to professionals in remote sensing, or to anyone who may be considering utilizing NOAA AVHRR data for environmental dynamics analysis.