Rapid Response Research (RAPID) Proposal to NSF Hydrologic Sciences: Impacts of Forest Fire on Snow Accumulation and Melt

最近的工作记录了被烧毁和未被烧毁的森林中的雪-植被相互作用，表明被烧毁的森林经历了更多的积雪，但更早和更快地融化。燃烧过的地区也会经历更高的风速，因此，增加了升华损失和显热输入。 在地方到流域的规模，野火衍生的黑碳脱落从烧毁的树木到积雪已被建议作为一个额外的重要迫使早期融化和轶事证据表明，积雪在野火地区似乎正在经历这种强迫。火灾的影响很可能代表了一个新的模式，雪植被动力学及其水文影响。这项水文研究将集中在最近烧毁的源头集水区，阴影湖在俄勒冈州瀑布，通常接收超过2米的雪水相当于每年冬天。这项研究将提供大量的直接结果的影响，野火积雪的积累和消融和所涉及的机制的幅度。 配对的网站将使我们能够量化网站的差异，三维测量将提供关键的植被结构信息，横断面提供的信息，在燃烧-未燃烧的梯度和最近和较旧的烧伤网站之间，从监测网络的数据将提供关键的空间和时间背景信息。 这项工作的结果将提供重要的见解，火对积雪动态的水文影响，有可能重新定义在受火灾影响的流域雪植被相互作用的范例。

Recent work documenting snow-vegetation interactions in burned and unburned forests show that burned forests experience increased snow accumulation but earlier and more rapid melt. Burned areas also experience higher wind speeds and as a result, increased sublimation losses and sensible heat inputs. At the local-to-watershed scale, wildfire-derived black carbon sloughing from burned trees onto the snowpack has been suggested as an additional important forcing of earlier melt and anecdotal evidence suggests that snowpacks in the wildfire areas appear to be experiencing this forcing. The effects of fire are likely to represent a new paradigm for snow-vegetation dynamics and their hydrologic impacts. This hydrologic research will focus on a recently burned headwaters catchment, Shadow Lake in the Oregon Cascades, which typically receives over 2 m of snow water equivalent each winter. This research will provide substantial direct results on the impacts of wildfire on snowpack accumulation and ablation and the magnitudes of the mechanisms involved. Paired sites will allow us to quantify site differences, 3-dimensional measurements will provide key vegetation structure information, transects provide information across burned-unburned gradients and between recent and older burn sites, and data from monitoring networks will provide key spatial and temporal contextual information. The results of this work will provide important insights into the hydrologic impacts of fire on snowpack dynamics with potential to redefine the paradigm of snow-vegetation interactions in fire-affected watersheds.