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Reply to Shen et al.: No evidence to show nongrowing season NDVI affects spring phenology trend in the Tibetan Plateau over the last decade

We appreciate the comments on our article (1) from Shen et al. (2). They raise the issue of whether the nongrowing season (NGS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) could affect spring phenology as interpreted from time series NDVI data. To address it, they compared the NGS NDVIs of two separate periods (1998–2000 and 2009–2011) and found a higher 2009–2011 NGS NDVI than that of 1998–2000, which was considered to negatively (e.g., advanced) bias retrieved spring phenology results [figure 1 A and B in the letter (2)]. We found that the NGS NDVI increase from 1998–2000 to 2009–2011 was overused to represent the trend from 1998 to 2011 because of the effects of outliers in 1998 and 2000 (Fig. 1A). We used snow depth data derived from passive microwave remote sensing for the studied area (3) and found that snow depth from January to April was significantly higher in 1998 and 2000 (Fig. 1B). The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event resulted in the most severe snow storm in the 1997/1998 winter across the Tibetan Plateau (4), which led to lower NGS NDVI from January to April in 1998. The La Nina in year 1999/2000 also resulted in big snow and lower NGS NDVI on the plateau in 2000 (Fig. 1B). Actually, the trends of the NDVIs in February, March, and April were not statistically significant when we removed the outliers in 1998 and 2000 (Fig. 1C). January NDVI increasing was significant. However, it will not affect start of the vegetation growing season (SOS) retrieval because all of the green-up dates happened after March on the plateau.