Sources of bias and variability in long-term Landsat time series over Canadian boreal forests

- Landsat time series were produced for fifteen Canadian boreal forest sites.
- Landsat time series contain biases and variability caused by data artifacts.
- Sensor view angle variance affects red and NIR reflectances but not NDVI.
- Landsat 7 ETM+ data have lower red reflectance values than Landsat 5 TM data.
- Combining ETM+ and TM data introduces artificial long-term trends in NDVI.

A variety of evidence suggests that the boreal forests of Canada are responding to climate change. Specifically, several studies have inferred that widespread browning trends detected in time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) reflect the response of boreal forests to longer growing seasons, increased summer drought stress, and higher frequency of fires. Data from the Thematic Mapper (TM5) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensors onboard Landsat 5 and 7, respectively, span essentially the same time period as the AVHRR record, but provide data with substantially higher radiometric and spatial fidelity, and by extension, a much improved basis for evaluating decadal-scale trends in spectral vegetation indices such as the NDVI. However, detection of trends, which are often subtle, requires careful attention to ensure that artifacts associated with the quality and stability of inter- and intra-sensor calibration do not lead to spurious conclusions in results from time series analyses. In this paper, we use time series of TM5 and ETM+ images for fifteen sites distributed across the Canadian boreal forest zone to explore if and how sensor geometry and inter- and intra-sensor calibration affect trends in spectral vegetation indices derived from multi-decadal Landsat time series. To do this, we created annual cloud-free composites for each Landsat spectral band based on peak summer NDVI at each site from 1984 to 2011 using all available TM5 and ETM+ data. To distinguish trends arising from long term climate change from those related to disturbance, we isolated areas within each site that were undisturbed during the Landsat record, and used these locations to analyze sources of variance in time series of red reflectance, near-infrared (NIR) reflectance, the NDVI, and the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI). Our results highlight the challenges involved in distinguishing trends in surface properties from data artifacts caused by undetected atmospheric effects, changes in sensor view angles, and subtle radiometric differences between the TM5 and ETM+ sensors. In particular, differences in sensor view geometry across adjacent overlapping Landsat scenes cause vegetated pixels in the eastern portion of Landsat scenes to have higher reflectances in the red and NIR bands (by 5 and 6 percent, respectively) than pixels in the western portion of scenes. While this effect does not significantly change NDVI values, it does affect EVI values. We also found modest, but potentially significant, differences between the red band reflectance of each sensor, with TM5 data having 14 percent higher red reflectance on average for vegetated pixels, which can introduce spurious trends in time series that combine TM5 and ETM+ data. More generally, the results from this work demonstrate that while the 30 + year Landsat archive provides unprecedented opportunities for studying changes to the Earth's terrestrial biosphere over the last three decades, care must be taken when inferring trends in these data without considering how sources of variance unrelated to surface processes affect the integrity of Landsat time series.