Marsscapes to Terrestrial Moonscapes: A Variety of Water Problems

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of nine papers that are divided into sections on: 1. Mars (four papers); 2. Land-management implications of terrestrial climate change (three papers); and 3. Methods of postfire hydrologic analysis (two papers). In the Mars section, three articles use spacecraft data to address the question of an ancient paleoocean in the northern plains along with the evolution of the Tharsis Superplume and Valles Marineris. The final one is an overview of the niches which, based upon terrestrial analogues, may have been hospitable for life. The studies that addressed practical, climate-change-related land management challenges included one each on spring discharge of a fractured basaltic aquifer that is critical for both water supply and energy production in California, which forestry treatments retain the most moisture on the landscape, and how a sensitive salamander responds to fuel-reduction activities in a drying climate. The final section contains two interconnected, pedagogical articles. The first one makes the point that satellite-based remote sensing of postfire vegetation burn severity is inapt for hydrologic analyses. Instead, the appropriate metric is soil burn severity. We developed the sequel for the US Forest Service’s Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) Program as a manual on postfire hydrologic modeling. Rather than being a tutorial on specific software, it seeks to explain how to think like a modeler, appreciate model limitations and uncertainty, and communicate predictions to the public in such a way that they understand a) how wrong and b) how useful the numbers are.