A Missing Link? Fuel Moisture - Soil Moisture Interaction
Abstract
Dead fuel moisture is important for a variety of fire modeling applications. However, direct fuel moisture measurements are rarely available to drive these models, meaning that fuel moisture must be represented by proxies or indices. Most of these indices are derived using atmospheric conditions, ignoring the interaction of fuel with the surface it is in contact with. We explore whether soil moisture can be a better predictor of dead fuel moisture. The benefit of using soil moisture as a proxy for fuel moisture is that it can be easily sampled in the field, there are a lot of satellite derived products to approximate soil moisture on a continental scale, and the soil-fuel moisture relationship can be explained using mechanistic models. Despite the physical link between soil vapor fluxes with dead fuel moisture, the relationship has been poorly studied. Using field collected 1 and 10 hour fuel moisture samples along with topographic variables, weather conditions, and soil moisture, we use multiple linear regression to understand the explanatory power of adding soil moisture as a predictor of fuel moisture. We find that while relative humidity provides the most explanatory power, soil moisture becomes an increasingly good predictor of fuel moisture as soils get wetter.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.H23S2180R
- Keywords:
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- 1813 Eco-hydrology;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1824 Geomorphology: general;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1860 Streamflow;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1871 Surface water quality;
- HYDROLOGY