Investigating the Relationship Between Soil Moisture and Growing Season Wildfires in Western Oklahoma

Wildfires are costly natural disasters, leaving swaths of destroyed land and property in their wake. Oklahoma is consistently one of the top ten states in the US for wildfire risk, making it an important and useful study area for wildfire research. Soil moisture’s relationship to wildfires is a growing field of study, but is not widely applied to wildfire risk management. We will investigate the use of in-situ soil moisture measurements as a proxy for fuel moisture, and analyze how well fractional water values can convey wildfire risk in western Oklahoma grasslands. Several wildfires of varying intensity and size during the Oklahoma growing season will be studied. We will utilize Oklahoma Mesonet data to investigate what soil moisture values are best suited for wildfire risk assessment and state the case for more widespread in-situ monitoring of soil moisture.