The Experimental Live Fuel Moisture images (Burgan and Hartford 1997) portray an estimate of live shrub moisture contents and will give best estimates in plant communities that are dominated by shrubs. The base moisture content range for each pixel has been determined using maximum and minimum NDVI images for the historical period dating back through 1989. For example, areas with historically low minimum and maximum NDVI generally correspond to arid communities and yield minimum calculated moisture contents as low as 50% on a dry weight basis. Maximum moisture content in the most arid sites will be at least 100% but may range higher. Very moist sites may range from a minimum of 90% to a maximum of 250%.

The Relative Greenness image data is used to determine the weekly moisture estimate within each pixel's potential moisture range as follows: pixel mc = ((RG/100) * pixel mc range) + pixel mc minimum. Where mc is moisture content on a dry weight basis and RG is the Relative Greenness pixel value for the week. Use caution with the moisture image if there are clouds or smoke in the area of interest because they diminish the measured plant reflectance and artificially lower the calculated moisture content. The moisture image will be most useful in those shrub communities where users have measured live fuels (ground truthed) and developed correlations between measured and image moisture values.