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Fuel moisture content (FMC) is a critical driver of wildfire ignition and spread, yet spatially continuous, timely estimates remain elusive. This talk presents a machine learning framework for estimating FMC across the contiguous United States using gradient-boosted trees (XGBoost) trained on field observations and multi-source remote sensing data. We begin with dead fuel moisture, where VIIRS and GOES-ABI satellite retrievals provide strong predictive signal — this work establishes the methodology and demonstrates what satellite observations can contribute at hourly and daily timescales. We then extend that framework to the harder live fuel moisture problem, where plant physiology, species composition, and multi-week antecedent water stress all matter. The live FMC model ingests VIIRS surface reflectance and multi-scale temporal band averages, HRRR atmospheric fields across nine averaging windows (1–84 days), static landscape descriptors, and a fine-grained species encoding spanning 206 plant types across tree, shrub, and grass fuel categories — roughly 371 predictors in total. Encoding species identity alone reduces the 2024 holdout test RMSE from 27.2% to 21.8% FMC. After hyperparameter optimization the final model achieves RMSE = 21.6% and R² = 0.71 on the held-out 2024 test year, an 80% reduction in error relative to a climatological baseline. We close with ongoing work to operationalize these retrievals within the NOAA JPSS/VIIRS data stream.

This event is part of a series:

Fire Lab Seminar Series

The Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory has been hosting an annual seminar series since 1998. Hour-long seminars are presented by Fire Lab employees and other researchers from throughout the world. Seminars cover current research and management about the natural world from a broad range of disciplines, but most seminars usually have a wildland fire theme. The Fire Lab Seminar Series provides a platform for researchers and managers to present their work in an environment that encourages critical thought, the free exchange of ideas, and knowledge discovery. For more information, visit the Fire Lab Seminar Series page.

Event Details

Apr 16 2026, 11am - 12pm Mountain Time

Virtual Event
Presenter(s): John Schreck

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