Monitoring vegetation greenness with satellite data

Vegetation greenness can be monitored at 1-km resolution for the conterminous United States through data obtained from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer on the NOAA-11 weather satellites. The data are used to calculate biweekly composites of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. The resulting composite images are updated weekly and made available to land managers who then calculate and display two measures of percentage vegetation greenness. The images provide a useful method of monitoring the condition of vegetation for fire or range management or other land management functions.