THE STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NORMALIZED DIFFERENCE VEGETATION INDEX AND BOTH TEMPERATURE AND PRECIPITATION IN EAST CHINA

With the methods of correlation analysis and SVD, the interactions between vegetation and both temperature and precipitation are studied for 1982—2001 in East China by using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and monthly climate data of 131 standard meteorological stations. Based on the correlation analysis, the result shows that the highest NDVI value lags behind the maximum temperature by about a month. The correlation between air temperature and subsequent NDVI is negative in spring and summer while being mostly positive in autumn and winter. The correlation between NDVI and subsequent temperature is almost all negative. The maximum of NDVI is about two months lagging behind that of precipitation. The correlation coefficient is negative for concurrent NDVI and precipitation while being negative if precipitation leads NDVI or NDVI leads precipitation by more than a month. The SVD analysis suggests good correlations between July NDVI and both temperature and precipitation in August. The correlation is highly positive between the NDVI in the southwest and northeast of Henan province and the temperature in most areas shows, while the NDVI in Yangtze River basin is much negatively correlated with the precipitation in areas south of 32 °N. Therefore, the vegetation variability could be considered one of the factors of reference in forecasting the subsequent temperature and precipitation in the east of China.