Relying on GOES observed dryness

GOES surface dryness product from 30 August 2011 with the PSA dryness grids overlaid from 31 August 2011. Areas in red and yellow indicate significant surface dryness, with areas in green indicating relative moist surface areas. We see that the PSA dryness grids drop off sharply at the OK/KS/CO border, which is not reflected in the GOES surface dryness product.
Today during our fire weather forecast we attempted to analyze the burnable fuel threat and the relative dryness over our forecast area covering much of TX, OK and KS. Apparently there has been a data problem with the operational PSA dryness grids over KS today which forced us to rely on the GOES observed surface dryness and NDVI products, which gave us a unique 'data denial' experiment to determine the availability of dry fuels (see image above). We see that GOES observed surface dryness is very high (reds) over much of KS, so we had to include this area within our burnable fuels threat today.


7-day NDVI composite (left) and 28-day NDVI change (right) from 29 August 2011. Areas of green indicate regions of increased (or increasing) vegetation, while areas of brown indicate regions of decreased (or decreasing) vegetation.
We also examined the NDVI and NDVI change composites in our analysis to determine the amount of vegetation available over these extremely dry areas. If we look at the NDVI composite, much of this area is shown as not containing a lot of green vegetation (leftmost image above). However, examining the experimental NDVI change product, we do see that most of this area is showing signs of 'greening' (rightmost image above). From this we determined that the amount of vegetation is slightly increasing, but still relatively dry and burnable (from our observations using the GOES dryness and NDVI composite products).