Design and implementation of operational system for national crop growth condition monitoring with remote sensing

The crop growth condition monitoring is one of the most important parts of agricultural condition monitoring. In order to build an operational system for crop growth condition monitoring, the method and the architecture with remote sensing and ground survey were introduced in the paper. For remote sensing, the temporal-spatial parameters derived from NDVI time series could be used to describe the crop growth condition from different respects. For ground survey, a nationwide network involving 200 counties distributed in the major farming areas had been set up for ground truth information acquisition. A kind of Client/Server (C/S) and Browser/Server (B/S) hybrid architecture of the operational system was designed to facilitate different operation modes of remote sensing and ground survey. However, some problems need to be solved in the operational system. Because of crop species difference and regional variety, there is not a common standard of crop growth condition evaluation in ground survey. Because there is still some limits from crop growth condition monitoring to agricultural production, maybe the model coupling of crop growth model with crop growth condition evaluation model by remote sensing is needed and the C/S structure needs to be divided further into function layer and application layer to make it easier to perform the system integration and maintenance. The study area was selected in major winter growing regions in China, and better results were obtained by the system. The system has been used in the crop monitoring system at a national scale.