Quantitative assessment of fire and vegetation properties in simulations with fire-enabled vegetation models from the Fire Model Intercomparison Project
<p>Global fire-vegetation models are widely used to assess impacts of environmental change on fire regimes and the carbon cycle and to infer relationships between climate, land use and fire. However, differences in model structure and parameterizations, in both the vegetation and fire componen...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2020-07-01
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| Series: | Geoscientific Model Development |
| Online Access: | https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/13/3299/2020/gmd-13-3299-2020.pdf |
| Summary: | <p>Global fire-vegetation models are widely used to assess
impacts of environmental change on fire regimes and the carbon cycle and to
infer relationships between climate, land use and fire. However,
differences in model structure and parameterizations, in both the vegetation
and fire components of these models, could influence overall model
performance, and to date there has been limited evaluation of how well
different models represent various aspects of fire regimes. The Fire Model
Intercomparison Project (FireMIP) is coordinating the evaluation of
state-of-the-art global fire models, in order to improve projections of fire
characteristics and fire impacts on ecosystems and human societies in the
context of global environmental change. Here we perform a systematic
evaluation of historical simulations made by nine FireMIP models to quantify
their ability to reproduce a range of fire and vegetation benchmarks. The
FireMIP models simulate a wide range in global annual total burnt area
(39–536 Mha) and global annual fire carbon emission (0.91–4.75 Pg C yr<span class="inline-formula"><sup>−1</sup></span>) for modern conditions (2002–2012), but most of the range in burnt
area is within observational uncertainty (345–468 Mha). Benchmarking scores
indicate that seven out of nine FireMIP models are able to represent the
spatial pattern in burnt area. The models also reproduce the seasonality in
burnt area reasonably well but struggle to simulate fire season length and
are largely unable to represent interannual variations in burnt area.
However, models that represent cropland fires see improved simulation of
fire seasonality in the Northern Hemisphere. The three FireMIP models which
explicitly simulate individual fires are able to reproduce the spatial
pattern in number of fires, but fire sizes are too small in key regions, and
this results in an underestimation of burnt area. The correct representation
of spatial and seasonal patterns in vegetation appears to correlate with a
better representation of burnt area. The two older fire models included in
the FireMIP ensemble (LPJ–GUESS–GlobFIRM, MC2) clearly perform less well
globally than other models, but it is difficult to distinguish between the
remaining ensemble members; some of these models are better at representing
certain aspects of the fire regime; none clearly outperforms all other
models across the full range of variables assessed.</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1991-959X 1991-9603 |