Transferring remotely sensed predictions of drought events on Bornean rainforests

In order to inform the development of a remote sensing drought monitoring system over Sabah, Borneo, this paper explored how a relationship between remotely sensed data and rainfall developed at one site in Sabah transferred to four other sites in Sabah. By way of developing relationships between rainfall statistics collected at five Sabah rainforest sites and remotely sensed data (acquired by NOAA AVHRR) processed to MIR reflectance, the VI3 index, the Ts/NDVI index and Ts/VI3 index, two points were concluded. The first was that the relationship between remotely sensed data and rainfall is non-stationary across Sabah during the 1997/1998 ENSO and the second was that the index Ts/VI3 is an effective means of using the remotely sensed data available.