Improving leaf area index retrieval over heterogeneous surface mixed with water

Abstract Land cover mixture at moderate- to coarse-resolution is an important cause for the uncertainty of global leaf area index (LAI) products. The accuracy of LAI retrievals over land-water mixed pixels is adversely impacted because water absorbs considerable solar radiation and thus can greatly lower pixel-level reflectance especially in the near-infrared wavelength. Here we proposed an approach named Reduced Water Effect (RWE) to improve the accuracy of LAI retrievals by accounting for water-induced negative bias in reflectances. The RWE consists of three parts: water area fraction (WAF) calculation, subpixel water reflectance computation in land-water mixed pixels and LAI retrieval using the operational MODIS LAI algorithm. The performance of RWE was carefully evaluated using the aggregated Landsat ETM+ reflectance of water pixels over different regions and observation dates and the aggregated 30-m LAI reference maps over three sites in the moderate-resolution pixel grid (500-m). Our results suggest that the mean absolute errors of water endmember reflectance in red and NIR bands were both