Validation Procedure for the Meris Terrestrial Chlorophyll Index (mtci)

The MERIS Terrestrial Chlorophyll Index (MTCI) is designed to monitor vegetation condition via an estimation of chlorophyll content. Its simplicity of calculation, suitability for automation and most importantly, sensitivity to all and notably, high values of chlorophyll content made it a suitable level-2 ESA product. This index effectively combines information on leaf area index and the chlorophyll concentration of leaves to produce image of chlorophyll content (i.e., the amount of chlorophyll per unit area of ground). It has now been used in several applications in which vegetation condition has been monitored at local to regional scales. However, MTCI has not yet been ‘validated’ using real chlorophyll content data collected at the spatial resolution of MERIS data (300m). This paper describes the procedure to validate this at MERIS spatial resolution.