Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology

Ranga Myneni
Email: myneni@bu.edu
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Climate and Vegitation Research Group

Ph.D., University of Antwerp, Belgium (1991)

Paleoceanography, Paleoclimatology, Marine Chemistry, Geochemistry

Variations in the amplitude and timing of the seasonal cycle of atmospheric carbon dioxide have shown an association with surface air temperature consistent with the hypothesis that warmer temperatures have promoted increases in plant growth in the northern high latitudes. We present evidence from satellite data that the photosynthetic activity of terrestrial vegetation increased from 1981 to 1991 in a manner suggesting an increase in plant growth associated with an increase in the duration of the active growing season. The regions of greatest increase lie between 45N and 70N where marked warming has occurred in the spring time due to an early disappearence of snow. The satellite data are concordent with an increase in amplitude of the seasonal cycle of atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeding 20% since the early 1970s, and an advance in the timing of the drawdown of carbon dioxide in spring and early summer of up to 7 days. Thus, both the satellite data and the carbon dioxide record indicate that the global carbon cycle has responded to interannual fluctuations in temperature which, although small at the global scale, are regionally highly significant.

Lucht et a. 2002. Climatic control of the high-latitude vegetation greening trend and Pinatubo effect. Science 296:1687-1689.
Bogaert et al. 2002. A mathematical comment on the formulae for the aggregation index and the shape index. Landscape Ecol. 17: 87-90.
Zhang et al. 2002. Assessing the Information Content of Multiangle Satellite Data for Mapping Biomes. I: Statistical Analysis, Remote Sens. Environ 80: 418-434.
Zhang et al. 2002. Assessing the Information Content of Multiangle Satellite Data for Mapping Biomes. II: Theory, Remote Sens. Environ. 80: 435-446.
Dickinson et al. 2002. Nitrogen Controls on Climate Model Evapotranspiration. J. Clim. 15(3): 278-295.
Shabanov et al. 2002. Analysis of interannual changes in northern vegetation ctivity observed in AVHRR data during 1981 to 1994. IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens. 40:115-130.
Myneni and Dong et al. 2001. A large carbon sink in the woody biomass of northern forests. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 98(26): 14784-14789. supplemental information Tucker et al. 2001. Higher northern latitude NDVI and growing season trends from 1982 to 1999. Int. J. Biometeorol. 45:184-190.
Wang et al. 2001. Investigation of product accuracy as a function of input and model uncertainities: Case study with SeaWiFS and MODIS LAI/FPAR Algorithm. Remote Sens. Environ. 78:296-311.
Zhou et al. 2001 Variations in northern vegetation activity inferred from satellite data of vegetation index during 1981 to 1999, J. Geophys. Res. 106(D17):20069-20083.