If you live in an area with high wildfire hazard, understanding the factors that raise or lower fire risk on any given day can help you live in better harmony with your surroundings.
In the Sacramento Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills this week, hot and windy conditions have prompted a red flag warning for high fire hazard. But the risk of a fire growing out of control varies widely across the area. One of the primary reasons for that variation is fuel moisture.
There are two types of fuel moisture we look at when assessing fire risk: live fuel moisture, which is the the moisture content in vegetation that’s growing, and dead fuel moisture, which is how dry the sticks and debris on the ground are.
We collected vegetation samples from sites at a variety of elevations, from the High Sierra, down through Nevada City, and into the low Sierra foothills, and took a look at the live fuel moisture levels to get a better idea of the current fire hazard levels.
Check out the video below for our experiment: