Automatic monitoring of autumn colours using MODIS data

An automatic methodology was developed for monitoring of the progress of autumn colours for the needs of tourists and tourism industry. MODIS imagery of red and near-infrared bands were used. Cloud problems were alleviated aggregating pixel blocks of 280 lines by 280 columns (70 km by 70 km). The drop of near-infrared reflectance from its summer-time maximum was used as a measure of the autumn colourization state. Satellite based autumn colour index was combined to a trend surface derived from ground observations.