New indicators for global crop monitoring in CropWatch -case study in North China Plain

CropWatch is a monitoring system developed and operated by the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (Chinese Academy of Sciences) to provide global-scale crop information. Now in its 15th year of operation, CropWatch was modified several times to be a timely, comprehensive and independent global agricultural monitoring system using advanced remote sensing technology. Currently CropWatch is being upgraded with new indicators based on new sensors, especially those on board of China Environmental Satellite (HJ-1 CCD), the Medium Resolution Spectral Imager (MERSI) on Chinese meteorological satellite (FY-3A) and cloud classification products of FY-2. With new satellite data, CropWatch will generate new indicators such as fallow land ratio (FLR), crop condition for irrigated (CCI) and non-irrigated (CCNI) areas separately, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), radiation use efficiency for the photosynthetically active radiation (RUE_PAR) and cropping index (CI) with crop rotation information (CRI). In this paper, the methods for monitoring the new indicators are applied to the North China Plain which is one of the major grain producing areas in China. This paper shows the preliminary results of the new indicators and methods; they still need to be thoroughly validated before being incorporated into the operational CropWatch system. In the future, the new and improved indicators will help us to better understand the global situation of food security.