A Google Earth Engine Algorithm to Map Phenological Metrics in Mountain Areas Worldwide with Landsat Collection and Sentinel-2

Abstract

Google Earth Engine has deeply changed the way in which Earth observation data are processed, allowing the analysis of wide areas in a faster and more efficient way than ever before. Since its inception, many functions have been implemented by a rapidly expanding community, but none so far has focused on the computation of phenological metrics in mountain areas with high-resolution data. This work aimed to fill this gap by developing an open-source Google Earth Engine algorithm to map phenological metrics (PMs) such as the Start of Season, End of Season, and Length of Season and detect the Peak of Season in mountain areas worldwide using high-resolution free satellite data from the Landsat collection and Sentinel-2. The script was tested considering the entire Alpine chain. The validation was performed by the cross-computation of PMs using the R package greenbrown, which permits land surface phenology and trend analysis, and the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) in homogeneous quote and land cover alpine landscapes. MAE and RMSE were computed. Therefore, this algorithm permits one to compute with a certain robustness PMs retrieved from higher-resolution free EO data from GEE in mountain areas worldwide.

Keywords

• Google Earth Engine
• phenological metrics
• mountains
• algorithm
• Sentinel-2
• Landsat collection 4–9