Wildfire Continuum Flood Frequency Analysis

Moderate- to high-severity wildfire can abruptly alter watershed properties, which intensifies extreme hydrologic responses such as debris flow and flooding. Understanding the frequency and severity of such compound wildfire-flood hazards is of growing importance, particularly in wildfire-prone regions. However, standard statistical flood frequency analysis approaches are ill-suited to examining this issue because wildfire-affected peak flow observations are limited in number and violate the assumption of independent and identically distributed events. In this study, we propose a process-based framework to derive flood frequency that accounts for the range of possible flood responses to a continuum of watershed conditions, from the pre-wildfire conditions to the perturbed state immediately after a wildfire to the post-wildfire recovery conditions. 

 Yu (2025) Wildfire Continuum Flood Frequency Analysis, USGS Landslide Hazards Seminar, 09 April 2025.