Assessment of NDVI for Different Land Covers before and after Atmospheric Corrections

Abstract

The use of satellite images in order to obtain vegetation indices, namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), involves applying corrections to eliminate the atmospheric effects. This paper assesses NDVI for different land covers before and after atmospheric corrections on the basis of Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite images. The wide variations of the NDVI, highlighted by the mean and standard deviation, show that the atmospheric effects are variable and significant. The results reveal that the mean difference among NDVI values ranges from 1% to 64% before and after the atmospheric corrections for different land cover classes.