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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
Drought is among the most damaging of all natural disasters, with complex economic, environmental, and social effects that are often far-reaching and long-lasting. A key indicator of drought severity is the amount of water stored in the soil, often referred to as soil moisture, yet soil moisture measurements are generally underused for drought monitoring. This was once unavoidable because of a lack of soil moisture data, but the situation changed with the advent of large-scale monitoring networks that began in the 1990’s. Still, several key challenges limit the use of in situ soil moisture data for drought monitoring, and inhibit its translation into actionable information for producers and natural resource managers:...
Drought indices are widely used for drought quantification. The objective of this study is to introduce a hybrid drought index, the Precipitation Evapotranspiration Difference Condition Index (PEDCI), and to compare its performance in Oklahoma to existing drought indices. The PEDCI is based on a simple water balance model, which accounts for the difference between water supply (precipitation) and water demand (potential evapotranspiration). While it is similar in this respect to the Standardized Precipitation and Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index, it uses a different method to normalize the index in time and space which was inspired by Vegetation Condition Index. The performance...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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)...
Abstract (from https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts/81/3/490): In situ soil moisture measurements have the potential to improve wildfire danger assessments, which often rely on the Keetch–Byram Drought Index (KBDI) as a soil moisture surrogate. However, the relative merits of measured soil moisture and KBDI as indicators of wildfire danger are unknown. Therefore, our objectives were to (i) identify relationships between drought indices (KBDI or fraction of available water capacity, FAW) and wildfire size for 34,939 growing and dormant-season wildfires, (ii) compare relationships between each drought index and wildfire probability for 501 large (≥ 405 ha) growing-season and dormant-season...