Snow blankets the burn scar from 2020’s East Troublesome Fire in the high country near Grand Lake, Colorado.
Courtesy of Nick Hanson
Luke 21:11 “There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.”
Important Takeaways:
- Wildfires are burning away the West’s snow
- Researcher Stephanie Kampf’s team set out to determine whether more wildfires are burning at high elevations. The answer is unequivocally yes. And the consequences are dramatic: Snow in wildfire-burned areas is melting 18 to 24 days earlier than average.
- The snowpack is critical… it contributes 20% to 90% of surface water used for agriculture, energy production, aquatic species habitat and more.
- “What this study shows nicely is that fires are moving into places that we would think of as being more resistant because they’re cooler and wetter”
- The study also found that snow in burned areas contains less water
- Downstream water managers might need to prepare for an earlier melt-off that will contribute to reservoirs much earlier than needed.
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