Paired Storms Framework for Post-Fire Flood Analysis

To automate the analysis of the influence of wildfire on runoff events across numerous storms and watersheds the Paired Storms Framework was developed. The Framework applies the concepts of the established paired watersheds approach but exchanges time for space by identifying and comparing post-fire flood-producing storm characteristics to those of similar (i.e., paired) unburned storms in the same watershed. The Paired Storms Framework first retrieves and processes hourly 1 km2 gridded precipitation data from the NOAA Analysis of Record for Calibration (AORC) data product. Then storms are created using the RREDI Toolkit (Canham & Lane, 2024) and storm temporal, spatial, and interannual and seasonal context are calculated. Post-fire floods of interest are selected and for each post-fire flood, undisturbed paired storms are identified from the storm record as those with similar parameterized characteristics. Finally, the influence of the wildfire on the post-fire flood is calculated as a multiplier of how many times greater the post-fire runoff peak magnitude is than that of the paired storms. This Framework utilizes the open-source Python.

Utah Water Research Laboratory, Utah State University
Associated text: Canham, H., B. Lane (in review). Paired storms approach reveals post-fire flood characteristics and drivers. In review at Water Resources Research.

Associated code repository: Canham, H., Lane, B. (2024). Rainfall-Runoff Event Detection and Identification (RREDI) toolkit, HydroShare, http://www.hydroshare.org/resource/797fe26dfefb4d658b8f8bc898b320de