The timing and magnitude of changes to Hortonian overland flow at the watershed scale during the post-fire recovery process

Extreme hydrologic responses following wildfires can lead to floods and debris flows with costly economic and societal impacts. Process-based hydrologic and geomorphic models used to predict the downstream impacts of wildfire must account for temporal changes in hydrologic parameters related to the generation and subsequent routing of infiltration-excess overland flow across the landscape. However, we lack quantitative relationships showing how parameters change with time-since-burning, particularly at the watershed scale. To assess variations in best-fit hydrologic parameters with time, we used the KINEROS2 hydrological model to explore temporal changes in hillslope saturated hydraulic conductivity (K_sh) and channel hydraulic roughness (n_c) following a wildfire in the upper Arroyo Seco watershed (41.5 km²), which burned during the 2009 Station fire in the San Gabriel Mountains, California, USA. This study explored runoff-producing storms between 2008 and 2014 to infer watershed hydraulic properties by calibrating the model to observations at the watershed outlet. Modelling indicates K_sh is lowest in the first year following the fire and then increases at an average rate of approximately 4.2 mm/h/year during the first 5 years of recovery. The estimated values for K_sh in the first year following the fire are similar to those obtained in previous studies on smaller watersheds (<1.5 km²) following the Station fire, suggesting hydrologic changes detected here can be applied to lower-order watersheds. Hydraulic roughness, n_c, was lowest in the first year following the fire, but increased by a factor of 2 after 1 year of recovery. Post-fire observations suggest changes in n_c are due to changes in grain roughness and vegetation in channels. These results provide quantitative constraints on the magnitude of fire-induced hydrologic changes following severe wildfires in chaparral-dominated ecosystems as well as the timing of hydrologic recovery.