Chino well fire: a hydrologic evaluation of rainfall and runoff from the Mud Canyon watershed

Abstract

Forest fires often alter the balance between rainfall and resulting runoff of natural watersheds. This may result in flooding of the burned watershed at points down-stream. Such was the case for the Mud Canyon water-shed on New Mexico's Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation in 1996. While the summer storms that followed the spring fire had a magnitude to be expected every five years, the resulting flood flows were more on the order of a one hundred-year event. This 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 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.