Date of Award:

5-2026

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

Belize Lane

Committee

Belize Lane

Committee

Colin Phillips

Committee

Pin Shuai

Committee

Patrick Belmont

Committee

Brendan Murphy

Abstract

Wildfire is a natural process, however, wildfire occurrence, severity, and size is increasing globally along with large storms. Despite the expectation that floods will be larger after wildfire, a large range in post-fire flood size has been observed. This creates challenges for emergency managers to prepare for flooding in areas where wildfire might occur. Aside from wildfire, many other factors influence the size of floods, making it difficult to isolate the influence of wildfire. This work finds that factors including wetter versus drier years and seasons can alter the size of a flood, effectively hiding the influence of wildfire. Additionally, the storm size, intensity, and where it rained can all influence the size of a flood. Once we account for storm differences, it is possible to calculate the change in flood size caused by wildfire. Watershed wetness characteristics, like total annual precipitation, have a large influence on post-fire flood size that may overshadow the wildfire influence itself. This dissertation also includes two publicly available tools to help evaluate and manage post-fire flooding. The Rainfall–Runoff Event Detection and Identification (RREDI) toolkit was developed and used throughout this research to automatically identify individual flood events. A machine learning model was developed to predict post-fire flood size across the western U.S. within three years post-fire that can be used in many different watershed, burn and storm conditions.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Download

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .