OlmoEarth's impact: Wildfire risk & prevention

In July 2021, Oregon’s Bootleg Fire burned over 400,000 acres. This fire was so intense that it created its own weather. Among the largest fires in the state’s history, it was fueled by a dangerous mixture of prolonged drought, extreme heat, and incredibly dry vegetation. Two years prior to ignition, the same area showed healthy, moisture-rich conditions. Just one month before, it had already shifted to severe dryness. These are conditions that scientists could have tracked in near real-time with live fuel moisture content (LFMC) data.

LFMC measures the amount of water remaining in living vegetation. As levels drop, ignition becomes easier and wildfires spread faster. Traditionally, LFMC is calculated through infrequent and sparse field samples, making it challenging to scale up to capture the fuel moisture variation across landscapes.

OlmoEarth transforms LFMC observations into scalable, cost-effective insights from a pipeline. It learns from satellites and environmental context to estimate LFMC for each 10-meter-square area on the ground, a resolution that allows experts to assess wildfire risk across vast landscapes—from individual burn perimeters to entire national forests.

LFMC estimates from the OlmoEarth Platform arrive quickly and at low cost, making frequent updates for any location in the Western U.S. available throughout the fire season. We’re working with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to produce LFMC and other layers to inform a new fire risk model as part of the AI Collaborative on Wildfire.

"The ability to easily fine-tune and deploy models is accelerating our work to develop a next-generation fire risk model,” says Kimberley Miner, Program Manager at NASA JPL. “We can iterate quickly and explore performance in various locations and seasons, which previously was labor- and resource-intensive."

LFMC is just the start of OlmoEarth Platform deployments we plan to carry out in the next few months. Our goal is to develop additional use cases that span wildfire risk monitoring across different applications and other sectors, such as agriculture, and to accelerate the network of partners leveraging OlmoEarth.