Nathan's paper on SMAP soil moisture and peatland fires is now out at ERL!

The paper shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, vegetation density is sufficiently low (likely due to land use change) in many Insular Southeast Asian peatlands to allow for soil moisture retrieval using SMAP. SMAP soil moisture carries information about burned area with as much as 30 days lag time, and provides information not contained in commonly-used precipitation metrics, because soil moisture is also influenced by anthropogenic canal-building in the area. The paper can be found here. Stanford's press release about the article can be found here