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Assessing vegetation response to precipitation in northwest Morocco during the last decade: an application of MODIS NDVI and high resolution reanalysis data

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Abstract

Understanding vegetation dynamics provides information on changes in land cover that can directly be related to regional changes in the climate system. In data-sparse regions, i.e. northwest Morocco studies are limited by the availability of comprehensive information on precipitation. We extracted precipitation data of high spatiotemporal resolution (2 km, 1 day) from the Northwest Africa Reanalysis (NwAR) and gridded Normalized Difference Negetation Index (NDVI) of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) that cover northwest Morocco over ten hydrological years (September 2000 to August 2010). The results are based on a sequence of linear regression analyses. The mean precipitation of different input timeframes is systematically applied as the predicting variables to the mean NDVI of the growing seasons. Results show that 73 % of the variance in mean NDVI is explained by the variance in mean precipitation at the beginning of the growing season (November to the end of December). The results also show that 75 % of the variance in the mean NDVI of agriculturally used areas is explained by the variance in mean precipitation of beginning September to the end of December. Potentially irrigated land cover of low to medium explained variance but of a high seasonal range in NDVI cover about 14 % of the study region. We conclude that a considerable part of agricultural used areas are still potentially rain-fed. The applied methods and especially the re-analysed precipitation data of high spatiotemporal resolution open a new quality of analysis valuable for, e.g. monitoring aspects, policy decisions or regulatory actions.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the project “Urban Agriculture as an Integrative Factor of Climate-Optimised Urban Development, Casablanca” (grant number 01LG0504A1). This project is part of the megacity research programme “Research for the Sustainable Development of Megacities of Tomorrow, Focus: Energy- and climate-efficient structures in urban growth centres”. We thank Mr. Christopher Brown for revisions and advice.

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  1. Chair of Climatology, Department of Ecology, Technische Universität Berlin, Rothenburgstraße 12, 12165, Berlin, Germany

    M. Otto, C. Höpfner, J. Curio & D. Scherer

  2. Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Innrain 52f, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria

    F. Maussion

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  1. M. Otto
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  2. C. Höpfner
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Correspondence to M. Otto.

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Otto, M., Höpfner, C., Curio, J. et al. Assessing vegetation response to precipitation in northwest Morocco during the last decade: an application of MODIS NDVI and high resolution reanalysis data. Theor Appl Climatol 123, 23–41 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-014-1344-3

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