Remote sensing of land surface phenology: A prospectus

The process of observing land surface phenology (or LSP) using remote sensing satellites is fundamentally different from ground level observation of phenophase transition of specific organisms. The scale disparity between the spatial extent of the organisms and the spatial resolution of the sensor leads to an ill-defined mixture of target and background or signal and noise. Much progress has been made in the monitoring and modeling of land surface phenologies over the past decade. The chapter first provides a brief overview of land surface phenology, starting with the Landsat 1 in 1972, and then proceeds to a survey of current LSP products. The problem of indistinct phenometrics in remote sensing data is considered and the alternative phenometrics derived from the convex quadratic model are presented with an application in the North American Great Plains using MODIS data from 2001 to 2012. The chapter concludes with a view forward to outstanding challenges for LSP research in the coming decade.