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Introduction

Tea growers are looking to satellite images to help produce and maintain healthy tea crops. The tea industry is expected to increase along with the world population creating a leading world cash crop. As one of the main tea producing countries, India has experienced a decline in tea production and quality. Tea growers in northeast India are concerned with the decline and are seeking help from NASA’s Terra Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument. 

ASTER image of Jorhat City, Assam, India acquired on May 7, 2010 showing Tocklai Tea Estate plantation within the outlined box.

ASTER image of Jorhat City, Assam, India acquired on May 7, 2010. Located among many tea plantations within the outlined box is the Tocklai Tea Estate where this study was conducted. Credit: Amlan Basumatari (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Major Findings

This study investigated a method using a remotely sensed ASTER image to monitor tea quality. The ASTER image was used to create a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) image in order to determine whether healthy versus unhealthy tea bushes could be differentiated. NDVI is used by researches to measure green vegetation or the amount of sunlight that is reflected by plants. In this study researchers found that the NDVI image could detect nutritional status of tea bushes due to their unique spectral reflectance characteristics, thus demonstrating an application for monitoring tea quality.

Publication Reference

R. Dutta, A. Stein, R.M. Bhagat, Integrating satellite images and spectroscopy to measuring green and black tea quality, Food Chemistry, Volume 127, Issue 2, 15 July 2011, Pages 866-874, ISSN 0308-8146. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2010.12.160.

Details

Last Updated

June 3, 2025

Published

Aug. 14, 2014

Author

Kari Beckendorf

Data Center/Project

Land Processes DAAC (LP DAAC)