Evaluating the effects of burn severity and precipitation on post-fire
watershed responses using distributed hydrologic models
Abstract
Wildfires can induce an abundance of vegetation and soil changes that
may trigger higher surface runoff and soil erosion, affecting the water
cycling within these ecosystems. In this study, we employed the Advanced
Terrestrial Simulator (ATS), an integrated and fully distributed
hydrologic model at watershed scale to investigate post-fire hydrologic
responses in a few selected watersheds with varying burn severity in the
Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The model couples surface
overland flow, subsurface flow, and canopy biophysical processes. We
developed a new fire module in ATS to account for the fire-caused
hydrophobicity in the topsoil. Modeling results show that the
watershed-averaged evapotranspiration is reduced after high burn
severity wildfires. Post-fire peak flows are increased by 21-34% in the
three study watersheds burned with medium to high severity due to the
fire-caused soil water repellency (SWR). However, the watershed impacted
by a low severity fire only witnessed a 2% surge in post-fire peak
flow. Furthermore, the high severity fire resulted in a mean reduction
of 38% in the infiltration rate within fire-impacted watershed during
the first post-fire wet season. Hypothetical numerical experiments with
a range of precipitation regimes after a high severity fire reveal the
post-fire peak flows can be escalated by 1-34% due to the SWR effect
triggered by the fire. This study implies the importance of applying
fully distributed hydrologic models in quantifying the
disturbance-feedback loop to account for the complexity brought by
spatial heterogeneity.