Northern hemispheric NDVI variations associated with large-scale climate indices in spring

Large-scale atmospheric systems, such as the Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, and so on, are important climatic change indicators over the northern hemisphere. These systems play essential roles in regional-to-continental scale climate fluctuation and vegetation activity in response to global change. Using the Pathfinder AVHRR NDVI (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) data for the period 1982-2000, the authors investigated the relationship of the inter-annual variations of spring NDVI to nine large-scale climate indices. On average, 57.2% of the satellite-sensed NDVI variance was explained. These climate indices also accounted for a large portion of the trends in NDVI as observed in five regions, namely, north-west North America (climate-related trend was 18.2%/10 years), south-eastern North America (5.8%/10 years), Europe (6.9%/10 years), high-latitude Asia (12.4%/10 years), and East Asia (8.0%/10 years). The results are useful for understanding and predicting the regional-to-continental NDVI variations in response to global climate change.