[A-CG37] Satellite Earth Environment Observation

[ACG37-18] Monitoring the Tropical Vegetation Using TRMM and GPM

*Sasagawa Taiga¹, Kenlo Nasahara² (1.Graduate School of Science and Technology, University of Tsukuba, 2.Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba)

Keywords:Vegetation, Precipitation radar, TRMM, GPM

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) are the precipitation measurement missions primarily led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The core satellites of these two missions are equipped with active precipitation radar. These satellites have successfully provided extensive and detailed information on precipitation, such as the Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMAP), in cooperation with other satellites. As such, TRMM and GPM must be recognized as successful precipitation monitoring missions. However, there is a large amount of TRMM and GPM data that do not observe precipitation, but only the land surface, and these data are not often used for land surface monitoring. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to evaluate the availability of radar data observed by TRMM and GPM for monitoring global land ecosystems, especially vegetation. We used TRMM data from 1997 to 2014 and GPM data from 2015 to 2022. We generated the vegetation cover map for each year, focusing on the deflections of the normalized radar cross section at different angles of incidence. Our results showed different tendency of vegetation change in comparion with optical sensor data. In the future, we will continue to study vegetation monitoring with TRMM and GPM radar data and compare it with the analysis results of optical sensor data. This research suggests the capabilities of TRMM and GPM data for vegetation monitoring, especially over tropical regions where satellite remote sensing with the optical sensor is difficult due to cloud cover.