Suchergebnisse

This is the final version. Available on open access from the European Geosciences Union via the DOI in this record ; Code and data availability. The benchmarking code is archived at https://zenodo.org/record/3879161#.Xtq-py-z2fU (last access: 5 June 2020) (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3879161, Kelley, 2020), which also contains the code to produce the figures presented here. The FireMIP model output is archived at https://zenodo.org/record/3555562#.Xell3C2ZOcY (last access: 22 November 2019) (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3555562, Hantson et al., 2019). Data availability for each reference dataset is provided in Table A1. ; 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−1) 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. ; European Union FP7 ; German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) ; European Research Council (ERC) ; Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) ; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) ; National Natural Science Foundation of China ; Strategic Research Area MERGE (ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system) ; Lund University Centre for Studies of Carbon Cycle and Climate Interactions (LUCCI)

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from EGU via the DOI in this record. ; The important role of fire in regulating vegetation community composition and contributions to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols make it a critical component of dynamic global vegetation models and Earth system models. Over 2 decades of development, a wide variety of model structures and mechanisms have been designed and incorporated into global fire models, which have been linked to different vegetation models. However, there has not yet been a systematic examination of how these different strategies contribute to model performance. Here we describe the structure of the first phase of the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP), which for the first time seeks to systematically compare a number of models. By combining a standardized set of input data and model experiments with a rigorous comparison of model outputs to each other and to observations, we will improve the understanding of what drives vegetation fire, how it can best be simulated, and what new or improved observational data could allow better constraints on model behavior. In this paper, we introduce the fire models used in the first phase of FireMIP, the simulation protocols applied, and the benchmarking system used to evaluate the models. We have also created supplementary tables that describe, in thorough mathematical detail, the structure of each model. ; S. Rabin was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and by the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, and along with S. Hantson and A. Arneth would like to acknowledge support by the EU FP7 projects BACCHUS (grant agreement no. 603445) and LUC4C (grant agreement no. 603542). This work was supported, in part, by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), through the Helmholtz Association and its research programme ATMO, and the HGF Impulse and Networking 5 fund. F. Li was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 41475099 and the CAS Youth Innovation Promotion Association Fellowship. The UK Met Office contribution was funded by BEIS under the Hadley Centre Climate Programme contract (GA01101). G. A. Folberth also wishes to acknowledge funding received from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 641816 (CRESCENDO). J. O. Kaplan was supported by the European Research Council (COEVOLVE, 313797).