Preliminarily Analysis of the Relation Between Satellite Derived Fuel Moisture Content and Wildfire Activity in Southwestern China

Fuel Moisture Content (FMC) is a key indicator for assessing wildfire risk and fire spread rate since fire normally broke out under low FMC condition. However, how the FMC driving wildfire activities is still unclear. To understand the relation between FMC and fire occurrence, this study focused on analyzing the FMC retrieved from Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) and historical fires extracted from MODIS Burned Area (BA) product MCD64A1 to determine critical FMC thresholds for wildfire occurrences in southwest China. The results indicated that there were three significant FMC thresholds for forest: 138.9%, 119.0% and 53.1%, and three thresholds for grassland: 138.3%, 70.2%, and 10.6% that associated with the occurrence of wildfires. Large fires and high frequency of fires became vulnerable when FMC fell below those thresholds.