Hydrologic Evaluation Of Flood Flows From A
Burned Watershed
Author(s)
A. W. Miller & E. J. Nelson
Abstract
Forest fires often alter the balance between rainfall and resulting runoff from
natural watersheds. This may result in flooding from the burned watershed at
locations downstream. Such was the case for the Mud Canyon watershed on New
Mexico’s Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. In the spring, a fire burned
approximately 42% of the watershed. Subsequent storms during the summer
caused flows in Mud Canyon that led to flooding downstream at the town of
Mescalero. The flooding was likely the result of inadequate remediation, neither
human nor natural, during the months between the fire and the storms. While the
summer storms that followed the spring fire had an updated magnitude to be
expected every ten years, the resulting updated flooding was more on the order
of a five hundred-year event. A purpose of this study was to determine the
amount of rainfall that produced the estimated flood flows. This result could then
be used to determine the degree to which the burned portion of the watershed
caused the flooding. The Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation (BAER) Plan
concluded that there was not a serious threat of flooding, based on the fact that
the soils in the watershed were well-drained and not hydrophobic. This updated
study focused on the new methodologies used to evaluate the hydrologic runoff
potential of a burned watershed when few variables were actually measured. The
paper concludes that the loss of ground cover, particularly for relatively steep
watersheds, should be seriously considered when evaluating the potential for
flooding on a burned watershed. The methods used for this updated hydrologic
analysis of Mud Canyon, as outlined in this paper, are applicable for future
analyses of burned watersheds to determine the extent to which loss of ground
cover contributes to increased flood flows.
Keywords: flooding, burned watershed, curve number, return period, intensityduration-
frequency, roughness.
Keywords
flooding, burned watershed, curve number, return period, intensityduration-
frequency, roughness
Related Book
Other papers in this volume
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