Western forests, snowpack, and wildfires appear trapped in vicious climate cycle
Enlarge / On the last day of summer, fall colors contrast with the burnt landscape of the Cameron Peak Fire on Sept. 21, 2021, in Larimer County, Colorado. (credit: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
When Stephanie Kampf visited one of her wildfire test plots near Colorado's Joe Wright Reservoir in June of 2021, the charred remains of what had been a cool, shady spruce and fir forest before the Cameron Peak Fire incinerated it nearly took her breath away.
We would walk through these burned areas and they were just black, nothing growing and already getting kind of hot," she said. And then you walk into an unburned patch, and there'd still be snow on the ground. You could almost breathe more."
The surveys, up at about 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains west of Fort Collins, were part of a rapid response science assessment to measure just how much the extreme 2020 wildfire season in the West disrupted the water-snow cycle in the critical late-snowmelt zone that serves as a huge natural reservoir. The snowmelt sustains river flows that nurture ecosystems, fills irrigation ditches for crops, and delivers supplies of industrial and drinking water to communities.