When she visited one of her wildfire test plots near Colorado's Joe Wright Reservoir in June of 2021, the charred remains of what had been a cool, shady spruce and fir forest were almost too much for her to bear.
She said that they walked through the burned areas and they were just black. There was still snow on the ground when you walked into the patch. You could breathe a little bit more.
A rapid response science assessment was done to measure how much the 2020 wildfire season in the West disrupted the water-snow cycle in the critical late-snow melt zone. The snow melt sustains river flows, fills irrigation ditches for crops, and delivers supplies of industrial and drinking water to communities.
According to the findings of the study, published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, the relationships of snow and water in Western mountain forests are caught in a vicious climate cycle with more fires leading to faster snowmelt and reduced water.
AdvertisementAccording to long-term wildfire records, fire was a rare visitor in many high altitude forests, with burn intervals of 200 to 300 years.
On the order of half of all streamflows, the snow accumulate zones in Colorado can produce, according to a Colorado State University researcher who is currently on sabbatical in Spain.
She said that it was striking to see no snow left when she went to Colorado. There was more than three feet of snow in one comparison plot. It is disturbing when you see how much has changed when you are used to it. It's kind of crazy. I thought what we experienced in 2020 was outside the norm, but I didn't realize how far away it was. That was just really upsetting.
Satellite data from 1984 to 2020 shows how wildfires are encroaching on the critical snow-storage zones across 70 percent of the Western mountain study area.
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