Data assimilation of fuel moisture in WRF-SFIRE

Fuel moisture is a major influence on the behavior of wildland fires and an important underlying factor in fire risk. We present a method to assimilate spatially sparse fuel moisture observations from remote automatic weather stations (RAWS) into the moisture model in WRF-SFIRE. WRF-SFIRE is a coupled atmospheric and fire behavior model which simulates the evolution of fuel moisture in idealized fuel species based on atmospheric state. The proposed method uses a modified trend surface model to estimate the fuel moisture field and its uncertainty based on currently available observations. At each grid point of WRF-SFIRE, this information is combined with the model forecast using a nonlinear Kalman filter, leading to an updated estimate of fuel moisture. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method with tests in two real-world situations: a region in Southern California, where two large Santa Ana fires occurred recently, and on a domain enclosing Colorado.