Gap Filling for Historical Landsat NDVI Time Series by Integrating Climate Data

High-quality Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series are essential in studying vegetation phenology, dynamic monitoring, and global change. Gap filling is the most important issue in reconstructing NDVI time series from satellites with high spatial resolution, e.g., the Landsat series and Chinese GaoFen-1/6 series. Due to the sparse revisit frequencies of high-resolution satellites, traditional reconstruction approaches face the challenge of dealing with large gaps in raw NDVI time series data. In this paper, a climate incorporated gap-filling (CGF) method is proposed for the reconstruction of Landsat historical NDVI time series data. The CGF model considers the relationship of the NDVI time series and climate conditions between two adjacent years. Climate variables, including downward solar shortwave radiation, precipitation, and temperature, are used to characterize the constrain factors of vegetation growth. Radial basis function networks (RBFNs) are used to link the NDVI time series between two adjacent years with variabilities in climatic conditions. An RBFN predicted a background NDVI time series in the target year, and the observed NDVI values in this year were used to adjust the predicted NDVI time series. Finally, the NDVI time series were recursively reconstructed from 2018 to 1986. The experiments were performed in a heterogeneous region in the Qilian Mountains. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately reconstruct and generate continuous 30 m 8-day NDVI time series using Landsat observations. The CGF method outperforms traditional time series reconstruction methods (e.g., the harmonic analysis of time series (HANTS) and Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter methods) when the raw time series is contaminated with large gaps, which widely exist in Landsat images.