Weather Data for SE Asia

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March 2002 bil files from TRMMM 2A12 data

Leaf Area Index

We have tried to get LAI V.04 data for the year 2000, but it does not start until day 57, so we are building a dataset from March, 2000 through February, 2001. Below are the results.
Thu Aug 19 15:33:59 PDT 2004: Problems with September and key scaling corrected.

We Off the top of my head, I would say that the data looks disturbingly noisy. This is also evident when I run a 45-frame animation of the year. My first thought was that the problem could lie in aggregating 100 cells into one. If clouds tend to cover leafy areas, the sample would be biased toward leafless areas in partly cloudy periods. However, a quick look at a movie of full-resolution data still shows trouble. See the time series below. Mariza, here are the monthly grids in full 1/120 degree resolution as ARC/INFO ASCII dumps. The first 7 lines are the internal header. They unzip to 2 gigabytes of ASCII.

These are the LAI values for 45 8-day periods from March,2000 through February, 2001. Ten points (indicated by squares) were randomly selected. This is the fine-scale data; no spatial aggregation was done. The background is aggregated June LAI, with the boundary of the SE Asia basins. LAI values range from 0 to 68. I don't know if there is a multiplier. The various no_data codes in the 8-day images were eliminated so that they could be average Any cell with one of the various no-data codes appears as no-data in the monthly maps. It would take all night to fill in gaps as I did for the aggregated data.

This image shows LAI for 14 8-day periods. Two leafy points and and three low_LAI points were randomly selected for graphing along the same time-scale as the thumbnail images. The black line shows the spatial mean LAI over the full SE Asia area depicted on the left side of the first maps on this page. When these data were aggregated into months, August was a mean of Aug5, Aug21, and Aug29 and September was a mean of Sept6, Sept14, and Sept22. Here is postscript.

Questions: Harvey Greenberg