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Advancements in wildfire danger modeling may increase wildfire preparedness, and therefore decrease loss of life, property, and habitat due to wildfire. Recent work by our team has shown wildfire danger models may be improved by incorporating soil moisture information. Still, soil moisture—an important determinant of wildfire risk—is not currently used for wildfire danger assessments because adequate soil moisture information has historically been unavailable. Our project addressed this gap by developing and disseminating improved soil moisture estimates and demonstrating their relevance to wildfire danger assessments. Our objectives were to (1) develop an effective model of soil moisture for the Red River and Rio...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Characterized by their extreme size, intensity, and severity, megafires are the most destructive, dangerous, and costly wildfires in the U.S. Over the past two decades, megafires have become more frequent in Oklahoma and Texas along with increasing extreme weather events and changes to fuel types caused by woody plant encroachment into grasslands. As climate change and woody plant encroachment are expected to continue or even accelerate, it is important to evaluate megafire risks and locate high-risk areas. This project will develop a new Megafire Risk Evaluation System (MERES) and make future projections of megafire probability in Oklahoma and Texas from 2024 to 2100. Outcomes and products from this project will...
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Wildfires scorched 10 million acres across the United States in 2015, and for the first time on record, wildfire suppression costs topped $2 billion. Wildfire danger modeling is an important tool for understanding when and where wildfires will occur, and recent work by our team in the South Central United States has shown wildfire danger models may be improved by incorporating soil moisture information. Advancements in wildfire danger modeling may increase wildfire preparedness, and therefore decrease loss of life, property, and habitat due to wildfire. Still, soil moisture—an important determinant of wildfire risk—is not currently used for wildfire danger assessments because data are generally unavailable at the...
Soil moisture is a fundamental determinant of plant growth, but soil moisture measurements are rarely assimilated into grassland productivity models, in part because methods of incorporating such data into statistical and mechanistic yield models have not been adequately investigated. Therefore, our objectives were to (a) quantify statistical relationships between in situ soil moisture measurements and biomass yield on grasslands in Oklahoma and (b) develop a simple, mechanistic biomass-yield model for grasslands capable of assimilating in situ soil moisture data. Soil moisture measurements (as fraction of available water capacity, FAW) explained 60% of the variability in county-level wild hay yield reported by...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Researchers developed a custom model that integrates gSSURGO soil property data with condensed climate data from PRISM (e.g., drought index) to predict fraction of available water for a given soil. The model was trained with in situ measured soil moisture data (point measurements) and expanded to spatial extent with gSSURGO maps and PRISM data. The code for the model was developed using a combination of statistical and GIS languages (R, Matlab, ArcGIS, etc.).
Soil moisture depletion during the growing season can induce plant water stress, thereby driving declines in grassland fuel moisture and accelerating curing. These drying and curing dynamics and their dependencies on soil moisture are inadequately represented in fire danger models. To elucidate these relationships, grassland fuelbed characteristics and soil moisture were monitored in nine patches of tallgrass prairie under patch-burn management in Oklahoma, USA, during two growing seasons. This study period included a severe drought (in 2012), which resulted in a large wildfire outbreak near the study site. Fuel moisture of the mixed live and dead herbaceous fuels (MFM) clearly tracked soil moisture, expressed as...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Modeled soil moisture raster maps (4km-pixels) displaying volumetric water content (VWC) and fraction of available water (FAW) in 10-cm depth increments for the 2015-2019 period for the Red River and Rio Grande basins.
Abstract (from Science Direct): Agricultural drought is characterized by low soil moisture levels that negatively affect agricultural production, but in situ soil moisture measurements are largely absent from indices commonly used to describe agricultural drought. Instead, many indices incorporate weather-derived soil moisture estimates, which is necessary, in part, because the relationships between in situ soil moisture and agricultural-drought impacts are not well quantified. Our objective was to use in situ soil moisture data from monitoring networks in Oklahoma and West Texas to identify a soil moisture-based agricultural drought index that is (i) strongly related to crop-yield anomaly across networks, (ii)...
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Soil moisture is a critical variable for understanding the impacts of drought on ecological, hydrological, and agricultural systems. Yet, key research gaps currently prevent existing soil moisture measurements from being used to assess drought conditions and mitigate drought impacts such as wildfire outbreaks, lost agricultural production, and degraded wildlife habitat. In fact, most scales used to characterize the severity of drought, known as “drought indices”, don’t include soil moisture measurements, relying instead on atmospheric data. Current barriers to the incorporation of soil moisture data include a lack of consensus regarding how to best construct soil moisture-based drought indices, the challenges associated...
Abstract (from CSIRO Publishing): Soil moisture conditions are represented in fire danger rating systems mainly through simple drought indices based on meteorological variables, even though better sources of soil moisture information are increasingly available. This review summarises a growing body of evidence indicating that greater use of in situ, remotely sensed, and modelled soil moisture information in fire danger rating systems could lead to better estimates of dynamic live and dead herbaceous fuel loads, more accurate live and dead fuel moisture predictions, earlier warning of wildfire danger, and better forecasts of wildfire occurrence and size. Potential uses of soil moisture information in existing wildfire...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation


    map background search result map search result map Soil Moisture-Based Drought Monitoring for the South Central Region Wildfire Probability Mapping Based on Regional Soil Moisture Models Soil Moisture Data for the Red River and Rio Grande Basins from 2015-2019 Megafire Risk Evaluation System (MERES) for the Southern Great Plains Soil Moisture Data for the Red River and Rio Grande Basins from 2015-2019 Soil Moisture-Based Drought Monitoring for the South Central Region Megafire Risk Evaluation System (MERES) for the Southern Great Plains Wildfire Probability Mapping Based on Regional Soil Moisture Models