Early validation of a live fuel moisture content product based on sentinel-2 and sentinel-3 images

Live Fuel Moisture Content is strongly related to the proneness of live vegetation to ignite and burn, and as such, it is one of the fundamental variables in fire ignition and fire behavior models. While in-situ measurements of this physical variable remain irreplaceable and invaluable, long-term historical records are mostly concentrated in select regions of Mediterranean Europe, United States and Australia. For this and other reasons, there is a strong interest in obtaining estimates based on remotely sensed data on a large spatial scale. To this end, this paper proposes a Live Fuel Moisture Content product based on optical satellite imagery acquired by the European satellites Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3, and an inversion procedure based on the PROSAIL family of radiative transfer models. An early validation of the product is presented at the S2 and S3 spatial scales using field data provided by the Portuguese Association for the Development of Industrial Aerodynamics of the University of Coimbra and the Institute of BioEconomy of the Italian National Research Council.