About This Product
The Live Herbaceous Moisture map displays the percent moisture content on a dry-weight basis of live herbaceous fuels (e.g., grasses, forbs, ferns). In contrast to dead fuels, live herbaceous fuels have some greenness showing and moisture content is controlled largely by physiological processes within the plant (e.g., green-up in the spring, senescence in the fall).
Because live fuels consist mainly of water, fuel moisture values can go well over 100%. Low soil moisture can cause these fuels to decrease in fuel moisture and eventually convert to dead 1-hour fuels. Live herbaceous moisture is crudely modeled as a function of relative greenness for each 1-km square pixel of land and can range from 0–200%. This map is updated every Tuesday when the new weekly satellite data is processed.