Our multidisciplinary team at UC Berkeley has invited California Air Resources Board, the US Forest Service, and Dr. Robert O Green of NASA JPL and Dr. Thomas H. Mace of NASA Dryden to join us. California Air Resources Board's (CARB's) smoke management program deals with the harmful impacts of smoke generated from agricultural, forest and rangeland fires. The program achieves risk reduction in four ways: (i) registering and permitting of agricultural and prescribed burns; (ii) meteorological and smoke management forecasting; (iii) daily burn authorization; and (iv) enforcement. Members of our group have been directly involved in developing a spatialized version of the USFS First Order Fire Effects Model (FOFEM) into a Berkeley Fire Emission Estimation System (EES) through collaboration with CARB. The default, fire data input is the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) historical database of fire occurrences. This dataset is subject to constraints of data availability from responsible agencies, funding availability, and the chain-of-custody for data transfer. Alternatively, we have developed algorithms for fire detection and mapping using Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data. The EES is highly sensitive to the fuel moisture input implemented in the First Order Fire Effects Model (FOFEM). We seek to develop a new spatially and empirically based input for fuel moisture, as derived from remotely-sensed data. Also, EES model did not consider fire severity and burning intervention by fire fighting or natural rainfall activities. As a proof of concept for the first stage, we propose to develop methodologies for considering fire severity and burning intervention and improving fuel moisture as input to the models as well as using field data for validating the fire severity. We plan to use satellite (Landsat TM /ETM+ and MODIS) and airborne data composed of thermal, hyperspectral (AVIRIS) and Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR).