Publications

Assessing fire behavior in shrubland/grassland ecosystems of the western United States has proven especially problematic, in part due to the complex nature of the vegetation and its relationships with prior fire history events. Our goals in this study were (1) to determine if we can effectively leverage the high temporal resolution capabilities of current remote sensing systems such as...

Federal mandates and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS, also known as the Bureau) Fundamental Science Practices (FSP) policies require that publicly funded scientific data, publications, and derivative works be openly accessible to researchers and the public. Open access helps to leverage the public investment by making the acquired data and published information products—collectively...

Drought risk management involves three pillars: drought early warning, drought vulnerability and risk assessment, and drought preparedness, mitigation, and response. This book collects in one place a description of all the key components of the first pillar, and describes strategies for fitting these pieces together. The best modern drought early warning systems incorporate and integrate...

West Africa represents a wide gradient of climates, extending from tropical conditions along the Guinea Coast to the dry deserts of the south Sahara, and it has some of the lowest income, most vulnerable populations on the planet, which increases catastrophic impacts of low and high frequency climate variability. This paper investigates low and high frequency climate variability in West...

Monitoring rangelands by identifying the departure of contemporary conditions from long-term ecological potential allows for the disentanglement of natural biophysical gradients driving change from changes associated with land uses and other disturbance types. We developed maps of ecological potential (EP) for shrub, sagebrush (Artemisia spp.), perennial herbaceous, litter, and bare...

Complete and accurate burned area map data are needed to document spatial and temporal patterns of fires, to quantify their drivers, and to assess the impacts on human and natural systems. In this study, we developed the Landsat Burned Area (BA) algorithm, an update from the Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV) algorithm. Here, we present the BA algorithm and products...

There is a pressing need to monitor and understand the rapid land change happening around the world. The U.S. Geological Survey is developing a new capability, called Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP), to innovate the understanding of land change. This capability is the Earth Resources Observation and Science Center's foundation for an integrated U.S. Geological...

To support global drought early warning, the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at the University of California, Santa Barbara developed the Climate Hazards center InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) dataset, in collaboration with the US Geological Survey and NASA SERVIR. Specifically designed to support early warning applications, CHIRPS has high a spatial resolution (0.05°), a long...

The recently released Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) over the United States provides the opportunity to investigate landscape dynamics using dense time series observations at 30-m resolution. However, the dataset often contains data gaps (or missing data) because of cloud contamination or data acquisition strategy. We present a new algorithm that focuses on data gap filling using...

Droughts in Africa cause severe problems, such as crop failure, food shortages, famine, epidemics and even mass migration. To minimize the effects of drought on water and food security on Africa, a high-resolution drought dataset is essential to establish robust drought hazard probabilities and to assess drought vulnerability considering a multi- and cross-sectional perspective that...

Satellite-based actual evapotranspiration (ETa) is becoming increasingly reliable and available for various water management and agricultural applications from water budget studies to crop performance monitoring. The Operational Simplified Surface Energy Balance (SSEBop) model is currently used by the US Geological Survey (USGS) Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) to routinely...

Cool and warm season precipitation totals have been reconstructed on a gridded basis for North America using 439 tree-ring chronologies correlated with December-April totals and 547 different chronologies correlated with May-July totals. These discrete seasonal predictor chronologies are not significantly correlated with the alternate season and the reconstructions calibrate at least 40%...