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This webpage provides status and data of our field deployed soil moisture loggers with satellite uplink directly to this page for objective 2 of our SUSMAP (Science Utilization of SMAP) project (PI Bourgeau-Chavez grant # NNX16AN09G) which is described in more detail below.
Study Area: The boreal and Arctic regions of North America are characterized by low stature, sparse canopied vegetation with large stores of carbon locked belowground in the slowly decomposed organic soils. Due to a changing climate, the patterns of moisture in these organic soils and the vulnerability of these ecoregions to wildfire are also changing. In Alaska and Canada, the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/forests/fire-insects-disturbances/fire/14470) is used to estimate moisture in the organic soil layers of the ground from the surface (nominally 1.2 cm) down to deeper, more compact organic layers of the duff horizons (10-20 cm depth). The moisture status of the organic soil is a key driver of the potential for wildfire. The CFFDRS is a weather based point source system with inherent limitations that could be greatly improved with synoptic moisture information from a satellite sensor at high repeat frequency, such as SMAP.
Project Goal and Objectives: The goal of this project is to assess the utility of NASA’s L-band SMAP (https://smap.jpl.nasa.gov/) moisture products for fuel moisture monitoring in boreal and Arctic ecosystems of North America for fire danger and behavior assessment. To do this we have three objectives that we are addressing, including:
(1) Evaluating the 9 and 36 km gridded SMAP products for organic layer fuel moisture monitoring at the broadscale through comparison to the network of weather-based fuel moisture estimates (i.e. Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System’s duff code and drought code indices), the Canadian Land Data Assimilation System (CaLDAS) modeled root zone and near surface soil moisture, and the actual occurrence of wildfire;
(2) Collecting in-situ soil moisture and vegetation data within a SMAP grid cell at two boreal and one arctic location to better understand the spatial herterogeneity that exists across a SMAP grid cell as well as to refine high resolution C- and L-band soil moisture retrieval algorithms (e.g. Bourgeau-Chavez et al. 2013).
(3) By comparing passive SMAP data with high-resolution SAR imagery we plan to:
a) address the impact of scene heterogeneity and surface water on SMAP results; and
b) investigate methods for downscaling to a finer resolution (~ 3 km) soil moisture product through development of hydrological modeling and integration of high resolution SAR data from Sentinel-1 and/or PALSAR-2.
The overall investigation will yield a more complete understanding of the relationship between field measurements, the CFFDRS Fire Weather Index, CaLDAS moisture models, SAR and SMAP soil moisture.
The research is focused on organic soil moisture monitoring and CFFDRS modeling and prediction, however, impacts of this research will extend beyond improving modeling of fire danger to understanding spatial and temporal patterns of organic soil moisture in boreal-arctic ecosystems, something that has not been able to be monitored synoptically before now. With 2 day repeats, synoptic coverage, and an observation-based enhancement to the weather-based CFFDRS codes, SMAP will provide essential, complementary data to the weather data that provides the basis for current fire danger and behavior assessment.