Somewhat inspired by then-recent progress in the prognostic fire modeling realm (Kloster et al., 2010; Li et al., 2012) this study was formulated to help guide the priorities in the next generation of fire models in ESMs. A particular aspect of fires that might be difficult to simulate prognostically or in prescribed emissions in an ESM is their episidocity (from aerosol modeling perspective, how frequently and intensely emissions are released). Commonly spatial variation in fire days in presecribed emissions schemes looks like what is shown in panel (b) in the figure below.
In this project we investigate how important the frequency of emissions (i.e. number of fire days per month) is in simulating the climate impacts of fire aerosols (in terms of radiative forcing and impacts on the mean meridional circulation in the tropics). We find that at a coarse gridscale (1.9 x 2.5 degree) fire frequency is most important to resolve in the high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, where fire is most infrequent in observations.
The bottom line, however, is that we find that in most locations at this coarse a grid-scale, the uncertainty in climate impacts due to approximations in emission episodicity is smaller than the uncertainty due to other factors such as quantity, composition, or optical properties; the quantitative details can be found within our published manuscript.
© Copyright (2023) by Spencer Clark. Adapted from the hyde theme; built using Lektor.
