TERRESTRIAL VEGETATION COVER ACTIVITY AS A PROBLEM OF FLUCTUATING SURFACES

Abstract

The role of vegetation cover within the processes that link land and atmosphere is of stringent interest for the correct modeling of Climate dynamics. Temporal and spatial correlation of the terrestrial coverage varies according to Climate and acts as a major forcing on it through changes in surface energy and water balance as well as in the carbon cycle. Recent studies have enhanced the actual and potential impact of this forcing on the radiative balance thus evidencing effects that are at least comparable to that due to all the anthropogenic greenhouse gases together. At now, observational studies on land cover dynamics are strongly in progress thanks to satellite data. The availability of continuous observations of the land surface can allow us to understand the correlation structure, both in time and in space, that characterizes the land cover activity. Satellites provide time series of photosynthetic activity measures that can be regarded as a succession of observations of a two-dimensional scalar field. We exploited the paradigm of fluctuating surfaces as a mechanic analogue for our problem. To capture vegetation cover characteristic time-scales, persistence properties were evaluated by analysing annual maps of NDVI-AVHRR time series and persistence probability was estimated by using the sing-time distribution methodology. The analysis performed for ecoregions of Italian and Greek territories evidenced signatures of short range persistence with characteristic time scales that depend on land cover, climate, and anthropic activities. Our results confirm that such an approach can provide a useful parameterisation for including vegetation into climate models as a dynamical component.