Print Email Facebook Twitter Remote sensing estimation of vegetation moisture for the prediction of fire hazard Title Remote sensing estimation of vegetation moisture for the prediction of fire hazard Author Maffei, C. Menenti, M. Faculty Civil Engineering and Geosciences Department Geoscience & Remote Sensing Date 2013-06-03 Abstract Various factors contribute to forest fire hazard, and among them vegetation moisture is the one that dictates susceptibility to fire ignition and propagation. The scientific community has developed a number of spectral indexes based on remote sensing measurements in the optical domain for the assessment of vegetation equivalent water thickness (EWT), which is defined as the weight of liquid water per unit of leaf surface. However, fire models rely on the live fuel moisture content (LFMC) as a measure of vegetation moisture. LFMC is defined as the ratio of the weight of the liquid water in a leaf over the weight of dry matter, and spectral indexes proposed so far fail in capturing LFMC variability. The aim of our research was to understand the potential and limitations of MODIS instruments on board Terra and Aqua satellites in retrieving LFMC. To this purpose, a dataset of synthetic reflectance measurements was constructed basing on PROSPECT and SAIL radiative transfer models. Isolines of LFMC were identified in the plane representing measurements in channels 2 (0.86 ?m) and 5 (1.24 ?m), leading to the definition of a novel spectral index that is directly related to LFMC, the Perpendicular Moisture Index (PMI). The PMI was validated against simulated and real reflectance measurements, showing that it is robust to all variable factors affecting canopy reflectance except leaf area index (LAI). An indirect validation was performed in the study area of Campania (13595 km2), Italy, where the values of PMI calculated from MODIS images at fire locations were confronted against a dataset of more than 6800 events recorded in 2000-2008. This analysis showed a clear relationship between PMI and fire propagation speed. Subject fire hazardequivalent water thicknesslive fuel moisture contentPROSPECTSAILMODIS To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a8762e50-6def-4474-9346-8e6d83624277 Publisher EARSeL ISBN 978-88-89693-34-6 Source Proceedings of the 33th EARSeL Symposium "Towards Horizon 2020: Earth Observation and Social Perspectives", Matera, Italy, 3-6 June 2013 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2013 The Author(s) Files PDF 305892.pdf 244.69 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:a8762e50-6def-4474-9346-8e6d83624277/datastream/OBJ/view