RAPID: Drone-Based Microwave Remote Sensing of Soil Moisture and Fire-Induced Hydrologic Hazards in the Aftermath of the Monroe Canyon Wildfire

This project team will collect high-resolution, post-wildfire soil data using drone-mounted microwave sensors in response to the ongoing Monroe Canyon Wildfire in Utah's Fishlake National Forest. This wildfire intersects a region identified by the Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE) project as a critical data collection zone. As a result of this team's prior involvement in FASMEE's field campaigns and established relationships with local authorities and agencies, they are uniquely positioned to deploy and collect urgently needed post-fire soil hydrologic data. They will deploy their existing drone-mounted passive L-band radiometer system for two weeks following a precipitation event to measure fire-induced changes in soil moisture, infiltration dynamics, and hydrophobicity. These parameters are critical for understanding post-fire flood risks, erosion susceptibility, and ecosystem recovery. The resulting dataset will fill a crucial gap: no high-resolution, post-fire soil moisture datasets currently exist at this scale and resolution. Integration with NASA's UAVSAR pre-, during-, and post-fire L-band SAR observations will enable multi-scale, multi-modal analysis that is unprecedented in the wildfire recovery domain. The project will offer field based training for students and share resulting data in open repositories.

The researchers will collect the first high-resolution, drone-based microwave remote sensing dataset focused on soil moisture dynamics and fire-induced hydrologic change immediately following a high-intensity wildfire. By capturing daily soil moisture dry-down behavior over both burned and adjacent unburned areas using passive L-band microwave radiometry, the project will generate spatially explicit time series suitable for estimating key soil hydraulic parameters such as field capacity, critical point, and wilting point. These parameters are essential for understanding post-fire infiltration, storage, evaporation, and flood risk, yet are currently unavailable at landscape scales due to the lack of timely, high-resolution measurements. This data collection effort fills a critical gap in post-fire ecohydrology, providing spatial continuity that is lacking in point-based studies and finer granularity than satellite products. Through alignment of their UAS data collection trajectories with the NASA UAVSAR airborne SAR missions, which have collected pre- and during-fire data in the area and are anticipated to conduct post-fire flights, this team's measurements will form part of a unique multiscale dataset that links surface, near-surface, and airborne observations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Number: 2544973
Principal Investigator: Mohamad Alipour
Funds Obligated: $49,934
State: IL