Characterizing ecohydrological wildfire feedbacks with satellite-derived evapotranspiration
Abstract
Wildfires drastically alter the vegetation composition and structure in watersheds. These changes hold potentially long-lasting impacts on environmental processes such as water cycling and storage. While on-ground studies provide invaluable datasets to inform process-level understanding of changes in water cycling, the spatial extent and duration of observations can be limited by the required cost, time, and energy to install and maintain in situ measurement networks. Furthermore, evapotranspiration (ET), the second largest flux of water after precipitation in these burn areas is often overlooked. Recent advances in satellite-derived ET retrievals provide a rich data source to study wildfires and their impact. Here, we utilize NASA's ECOSTRESS ET algorithm and multi-decadal observations from MODIS to study the 2013 Rim Fire, one of California's largest wildfires. We evaluate the wildfire-ecohydrological feedbacks using the evaporative stress index (ESI), ET, and its components (transpiration (T), soil evaporation, and canopy evaporation). Before fires we hypothesize areas of lower ESI correspond to areas of greater burn intensity. After fires we hypothesize areas with greater burn intensity corresponds to the areas with larger decreases in T:ET partitioning and larger decreases in the ratio of mean annual ET to precipitation. Precipitation, discharge, temperature, and burn severity supplemental datasets facilitate estimating time-to-recovery across the fire's domain. Our findings hold implications for modeling and predicting the impacts of future wildfires on watershed storage and yield.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B33G2571P
- Keywords:
-
- 0428 Carbon cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0486 Soils/pedology;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0496 Water quality;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGY