Joshua B. Logan Helen Willemien Dow Douglas P. Smith Pat Iampietro Jonathan A. Warrick Thomas Lorenson Leticia Hallas Benjamin Kozlowicz Amy E. East 2024 <div class="article-section__content en main"><p>In a warming climate, an intensifying fire regime and higher likelihood of extreme rain are expected to increase watershed sediment yield in many regions. Understanding regional variability in landscape response to fire and post-fire rainfall is essential for managing water resources and infrastructure. We measured sediment yield resulting from sequential wildfire and extreme rain and flooding in the upper Carmel River watershed (116&nbsp;km²), on the central California coast, USA, using changes in sediment volume mapped in a reservoir. We determined that the sediment yield after fire and post-fire flooding was 854–1,100&nbsp;t/km²/yr, a factor of 3.5–4.6 greater than the long-term yield from this watershed and more than an order of magnitude greater than during severe drought conditions. In this first large-scale field validation test of the WEPPcloud/<i>wepppy</i><span>&nbsp;</span>framework for the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model on a burned landscape, WEPP predicted 81%–106% of the measured sediment yield. These findings will facilitate assessing and predicting future fire effects in steep watersheds with a Mediterranean climate and indicate that the increasingly widespread use of WEPP is appropriate for evaluating post-fire hillslope erosion even across 100-km²<span>&nbsp;</span>scales under conditions without debris flows.</p></div> application/pdf 10.1029/2024EA003575 en American Geophysical Union Post-fire sediment yield from a central California watershed: Field measurements and validation of the WEPP model article