Climate Warming and Satellite-based Land Cover Changes during 1980-2016

The past 30 years of environmental observations showed considerable global temperature increase and global changes in snow and ice cover, sea level, biological systems timing (plants, birds etc) and others. It has been also shown with 20-year satellite records that Earth vegetation has an early greening, especially in the northern latitudes. Currently, fifteen more years were added to the satellite records requiring re-evaluation of vegetation trends. NOAA/NESDIS has recently updated long-term satellite records produced from NOAA/AVHRR and SNPP/VIIRS data. These innovations permitted to develop the new 36-year Global Vegetation Health (GVH) dataset and products (greenness, moisture and thermal conditions, drought etc). The GVH were processed comprehensively to remove short- and long-term noise even those which had not been removed before. This paper investigates the 35-year no-noise Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series for the purpose of trend detection. Data showed that the 35-year data showed annual upward trend in the Northern Hemisphere. However, for the most important for vegetation summer period the trend both global and latitudinal is very negligible.