MSc defense by Yomna Eid

Yomna will present her M.Sc. thesis “Assessment of ESA CCI+ and NASA MODIS-LST in Ecological Transects of Australia” on January 14th 2022 at 10am. From the abstract: “Identifying the best-performing MODIS LST products available for scientific analysis is instrumental in long-term trend analysis in the context of climate change impact investigations. In this study, in the context of the ecological transects of the arid Australian continent, the statistical comparative study of the novel ESA CCI+ product supplied as part of the Land Surface Temperature project against the well-established NASA legacy product highlighted the shortcomings of the former. The successor and superior to it, the MYD21 state-of-the-art NASA MODIS LST, was used to conduct a two-decade time-series trend analysis across the same ecological transects. Additionally, it was supplemented with a time-series analysis of the spectral indices emblematic of the water-stress and vegetation vitality in the same region. The remarkable alignment of the real-life events described in local reports with the remote-sensing signal confidently concluded that vegetation in some of the arid sites in Australia is experiencing vegetation resilience. Lastly, the performance of the novel analytical framework of the STIC 1.2 model across this region as well revealed the ability to directly estimate the biophysical states of the surface energy balance with non-parametric means. Improvements of the model will likely lead to its robustness, and benchmarking it as a tool for estimating the ramifications of climate change.”

supervisors: Tobias Ullmann and Kaniska Mallick (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST))