NDVI Spectral Reflectance Scanner

Canopy Parameters

Chlorophyll health 75%

Vegetation cover (LAI) 70%

Spatial patchiness 35%

Sensor Band View

Live Field Readout

Dense healthy vegetation

Mean NDVI

0.00

Red reflectance

NIR reflectance

NDVI color scale

-0.10.20.50.9

How it works

Healthy leaves absorb red light (≈660 nm) for photosynthesis via chlorophyll, but scatter near-infrared light (≈850 nm) strongly because of their internal spongy-mesophyll cell structure. Satellites exploit this contrast: the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index compares the two bands a spacecraft actually measures:

NDVI = (NIR − Red) / (NIR + Red)

Each ground cell here is modeled as a linear mixture of bare soil and leaf reflectance, weighted by vegetation cover f (a proxy for leaf-area index):

R_red = (1 − f)·R_soil,red + f·R_leaf,red(health)
R_nir = (1 − f)·R_soil,nir + f·R_leaf,nir(health)

Lower chlorophyll health raises R_leaf,red (yellowing/senescence lets more red escape) and lowers R_leaf,nir (a degraded mesophyll scatters less), which is exactly why stressed or dying crops show a falling NDVI days before they visibly wilt — the basis of real crop-stress and drought monitoring from missions like Landsat and Sentinel-2.

Chlorophyll health — shifts each leaf pixel's red/NIR reflectance between a stressed and a vigorous spectral signature.
Vegetation cover (LAI) — blends the leaf signature with bare-soil reflectance; low cover exposes more soil.
Spatial patchiness — adds per-cell noise to both health and cover so the field isn't perfectly uniform, mimicking real canopy variability.
Band view — switch between what a true-color camera sees and what the Red, NIR and derived NDVI channels a multispectral sensor actually records look like.

Sun-synchronous pass · pushbroom scan
Band: NDVI

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