Decision support experiments and evaluations using seasonal to ...

and communities vulnerable to wildfire in the
western United States (Kitzberger et al., 2007).
Aside from the immediate impacts of a wildfire
(e.g., destruction of biomass, substantial altering
of ecosystem function), the increased likelihood
of high sediment deposition in streams and
flash flood events can present post-fire management
challenges including impacts to soil
stability on slopes and mudslides (e.g., Bisson
et al., 2003). While the highly complex nature
and substantially different ecologies of fireprone
systems precludes one-size-fits-all fire
management approaches (Noss et al., 2006),
climate information can help managers plan for
fire risk in the context of watershed management
and post-fire impacts, including impacts
on water resources. One danger is inundation
of water storage and treatment facilities with
sediment-rich water, creating potential for
significant expense for pre-treatment of water
or for facilities repair. Post-fire runoff can also
raise nitrate concentrations to levels that exceed
the federal drinking water standard (Meixner
and Wohlgemuth, 2004).
Work by Kuyumjian (2004), suggests that
coordination among fire specialists, hydrologists,
climate specialists, and municipal water
managers may produce useful warnings to
downstream water treatment facilities about
significant ash- and sediment-laden flows. For
example, in the wake of the 2000 Cerro Grande
fire in the vicinity of Los Alamos, New Mexico,
catastrophic floods were feared, due to the
fact that 40 percent of annual precipitation in
northern New Mexico is produced by summer
monsoon thunderstorms (e.g., Earles et al.,
2004). Concern about water quality and about
the potential for contaminants carried by flood
waters from the grounds of Los Alamos Nuclear
Laboratory to enter water supplies prompted
a multi-year water quality monitoring effort
(Gallaher and Koch, 2004). In the wake of the
2002 Bullock Fire and 2003 Aspen Fire in the
Santa Catalina Mountains adjacent to Tucson,
Arizona, heavy rainfall produced floods that
destroyed homes and caused one death in Canada
del Oro Wash in 2003 (Ekwurzel, 2004),
destroyed structures in the highly popular
Sabino Canyon recreation area and deposited
high sediment loads in Sabino Creek in 2003
(Desilets et al., 2006). A flood in 2006 wrought
a major transformation to the upper reaches of
Decision-Support Experiments and Evaluations using Seasonal to
Interannual Forecasts and Observational Data: A Focus on Water Resources
the creek (Kreutz, 2006). Residents of Summerhaven,
a small community located on Mt.
Lemmon, continues to be concerned about the
impacts of future fires on their water resources.
In all of these situations, climate information
can be helpful in assessing vulnerability to both
flooding and water quality issues.
Implementation/Application
Little published research specifically targets
interactions among climate, fire, and watershed
dynamics (OFCM, 2007b). Publications on fireclimate
interactions, however, provide a useful
entry point for examining needs for and uses
of climate information in decision processes
involving water resources. A continuing effort
to produce fire-climate outlooks was initiated
through a workshop held in Tucson, Arizona, in
late winter 2000. One of the goals of the workshop
was to identify the climate information
uses and needs of fire managers, fuel managers,
and other decision makers. Another was to
actually produce a fire-climate forecast for the
coming fire season. The project was initiated
through collaboration involving researchers at
the University of Arizona, the NOAA-funded
Climate Assessment for the Southwest Project
(CLIMAS), the Center for Ecological and Fire
Applications (CEFA) at the Desert Research
Institute in Reno, Nevada and the National
Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) located in
Boise, Idaho (Morehouse, 2000). Now called
the National Seasonal Assessment Workshop
(NSAW), the process continues to produce annual
fire-climate outlooks (e.g., Crawford et al.,
2006). The seasonal fire-climate forecasts produced
by NSAW have been published through
NIFC since 2004. During this same time period,
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