Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/Annual_Seasonality_Greenness_1698
Annual_Seasonality_Greenness_1698·v1·dataset

When plants green up and fade each year (Landsat, Arctic)

ABoVE: Annual Phenology Derived from Landsat across the ABoVE Core Domain, 1984-2014
biosphere NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 3 GeoTIFF
In plain English

What it measures. Yearly maps of the timing of seasonal plant events across the Arctic: when leaves emerge in spring, when they fade in autumn, and when greenness peaks, for each 30-meter patch from 1984 to 2014. It also includes supporting greenness and reflectance measures.

How it's made. Derived from long Landsat time series, fitting smooth curves through vegetation greenness measurements to pin down the timing of each seasonal stage.

How & where you'd use it. Helps scientists track how the growing season is shifting in far-northern ecosystems, a sensitive indicator of climate change.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › VEGETATION INDEX › NORMALIZED DIFFERENCE VEGETATION INDEX (NDVI)BIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › CANOPY CHARACTERISTICSBIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › PLANT PHENOLOGY

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span1984-01-01 → 2014-12-31
  • Measured byLANDSAT-5 (TM) · LANDSAT-7 (ETM+)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-170.006, 50.259, -98.974, 75.0139
  • FormatsGeoTIFF
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Map vegetation, forests and biomass
  • Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
  • Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description

This dataset provides annual maps of the timing of spring onset with leaf emergence, of autumn onset with leaf senescence, and of peak greenness for each 30 m pixel derived from Landsat time series of Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) observations from 1984 to 2014. The ABoVE core domain includes 169 ABoVE grid tiles across Alaska, USA and Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Saskatchewan, and Yukon, Canada. The data provided for deriving seasonality includes the total number of cloud-free observations, r-squared values between observed and spline-predicted Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), long-term average minimum EVI, long-term average maximum EVI, long-term average spring onset, long-term average autumn onset, annual spring onset, and annual autumn onset. The data provided for peak greenness includes annual peak Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), annual composite red reflectance, annual composite NIR reflectance, annual composite shortwave infrared reflectance (band 6, SWIR1), annual composite shortwave infrared reflectance (band 7, SWIR2), number of dates used to calculate composites, and day of year of associated maximum composite.

Get the data

annual_seasonality_greenness_1698_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="Annual_Seasonality_Greenness_1698",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.