Wildfires kill trees and other vegetation on the landscape. When wildfires burn in areas that have snowpacks lasting most or all of the winter, the lack of trees changes the rate at which snow accumulates in the winter and melts in the summer. This change is highly variable across the Western United States. Some areas and years see major changes to the timing of snowmelt and the magnitude of snow cover, while others see little change. This research effort tries to find out what factors may drive this variability in a snowpack's response to wildfire.

To answer this question, we use 40 years of data from the snow telemetry (SNOTEL) network and NASA Daymet meteorological data across the Western Continental United States. We modelled how snow behaves in unburned forests, and compared the expected results with the actual observations from burned forests. Our results indicate that years with late snow storms may be more resilient to the effects of the fire, while years with mid-winter melt events may be more susceptible to the effects of the fire. We also found that most snowpacks do not recover within 10 years of the fire.