Assessing drought based on vegetation water status using remote sensing in the

Sydney Basin bioregion, Australia.

Gabriele Caccamo, Laurie Chisholm, Marji Puotinen and Ross Bradstock

Spatio-temporal patterns in drought and moisture play a major role in determining the
probability of large fire events and their spatial distribution across the Sydney Basin,
and represent important factors to monitor for predicting fire potential across broad
regions. Remote sensing observations offer a cost-effective and spatially explicit
method for assessing moisture condition across large regions at regular time intervals
and fine spatial resolution. The objective of this study was thus to investigate the
potential for using multispectral remote sensing to monitor vegetation water status
across the Sydney Basin at two different temporal scales: inter-annual and intra-
annual.
A nine-year (2000-2009) image history of Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and a twenty four-year (1982-2006) image history of
Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (NOAA AVHRR) were used to analyse
the sensitivity of a wide range of spectral indices to inter-annual variations in
vegetation moisture conditions, from extremely dry to wet years. An extensive time
series of weather/drought indices was computed using weather station observations,
and used to investigate the temporal and spatial co-variability between spectral
properties and water deficiency across the entire Sydney Basin.
MODIS, NOAA AVHRR and Landsat 5 TM imagery time-series were used to
investigate the performance of satellite observations towards monitoring intra-annual
variation in vegetation water status across the Sydney Basin at different radiometric
and spatial resolutions. Samples of live fuel moisture content (LFMC) were collected
from several sites across three vegetation types (heathland, shrubland, woodland)
every three weeks for one year. Sophisticated photographic techniques enabled the
scale-up of LFMC values to canopy level, and different satellite-based vegetation and
water indices were tested to analyse their sensitivity to seasonal variations in canopy
LFMC.
Preliminary results suggest that these methods provide the basis for the development
of an operational remote monitoring system of fuel moisture conditions across the
Sydney Basin to improve the existing aspatial fire danger system used in NSW.