Developing soil moisture drainage maps for burned peatlands in the ABoVE study domain using time series Sentinel-1 SAR imagery and cloud computing resources
Abstract
Monitoring post wildfire vegetation regrowth and succession in the burned boreal uplands and peatlands of Northwest Territories (NWT) is important to track environmental health and ecosystem recovery. Rainfall and the associated soil moisture play a major role in post-wildfire vegetation regrowth within burned boreal areas. Here we present our methodology to produce post-fire soil drainage maps for several fires in the ABoVE study region as part of the NASA ABoVE project "Understanding the interactions between wildfire disturbance, landscape hydrology and post-fire recovery in boreal-taiga ecosystems" (Bourgeau-Chavez, 2018). We exploit the cloud computing resources developed by the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) to analyze a time series of Sentinel-1 C-band SAR imagery for several fires along the Great Slave Lake, NWT. A principal component analysis was performed on each Sentinel-1 time series to determine the "flashiness" of an area (i.e. how quickly an area responds to a rain event). Imagery was categorized into relative drainage classes with areas that quickly responded following a rain event being classified as high soil drainage and areas that stayed relative stable over time classified as poor soil drainage. Soil drainage classes were then validated using nearby weather stations and will be used to help calibrate post-fire vegetation recovery models. Cloud computing resources such as those developed by ASF will be vital for handling large data volumes produced in upcoming NASA mission such as NISAR.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMB063.0002P
- Keywords:
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- 0434 Data sets;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0452 Instruments and techniques;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1813 Eco-hydrology;
- HYDROLOGY