Harris Knakal

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Portland State University *

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310U

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Geography

Date

Dec 6, 2023

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docx

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Uploaded by ConstableTurkey3894

Harris Knakal Prof. Alexander Reid Ross GEOG 310U 29 April 2023 Literature Review https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/22/2527/2018/

The authors of the study, Assessing the Hydrologic Response to Wildfires in Mountainous Regions , aimed to examine how hydrological catchments respond to wildfires. To predict how a hydrological catchment would react to a wildfire, they used a hydrologic science model. In hydrology, a catchment is a region of land that drains water into a river, lake, or other body of water and is defined by the highest points of the landscape. It is also referred to as a watershed or drainage. They utilized data from the 2010 Colorado Fourmile Canyon Fire to validate and accredit their findings and claims. The scientists also considered how the timing of post fire precipitation and the severity of the fire affected the landscape's hydrologic responses. The study utilizes a SWAT model: continuous-time, distributed-parameter, process-based watershed model. This model has been used in past to assess hydrologic and water quality. The model is split into two hydrological phases, the land and routing phase which analyses such things as precipitation, infiltration, surface runoff, evapotranspiration, groundwater flow, snowmelt, and flood routing. As a result, such a model is perfect for analyzing how watersheds and drainages are affected by wildfires. The authors found wildfires in mountainous areas do indeed impact catchments. They observed that post fire precipitation can result in events such as flash floods, which can be a further risk to human life and infrastructure. They also found that the timing of post-fire precipitation can have a significant impact on the hydrologic response, with earlier precipitation events resulting in more severe hydrologic responses. What I find most fascinating about this article in terms of climate and hydrology is how the authors used a hydrologic model to simulate the hydrologic response to a wildfire. This method offers a useful on-going tool for evaluating the possible effects of wildfires on a catchment's hydrologic response. Furthermore, it can assist in further exploration of post fire

management of precipitation to help avoid possible further negative effects of wildfires such as floods, landslides, etc. In this way we can discover the most beneficial ways to mitigate post fire events caused by wildfire impact on catchments. To further enhance the paper, I believe another area of possible exploration is how affective different post fire management techniques are in mitigating the catchment problems discussed in the study. By doing this, the study could provide better direction towards a solution to managing catchments post wildfires. The paper also might have benefited from a more thorough description of the model's limitations and potential causes of outcome uncertainty as they only provide a short paragraph addressing this. However, the use of real-world wildfire data to validate their model gave the paper and the authors further credibility and validation to the claims made in the study. The figure depicting the simulated hydrologic response of the watershed to the Fourmile Canyon Fire is one figure from the paper that I found to be particularly instructive. The figure displays a correlation between higher burn severity and increased runoff. Figure 6: Simulated hydrologic response of the Fourmile Canyon catchment to the wildfire. The figure shows the observed and simulated streamflow, sediment yield, and peak discharge for the

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