FireMIP

Overview

Fire is an important Earth system process. It is regulated by weather, vegetation characteristics, and human activities and feeds back to them in multiple pathways. With the increasing forest fire emissions and extreme fires, understanding fire regime changes and their cross-sphere impacts is more critical than ever. The Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP), started in 2014, is an international collaborative effort aimed at improving global fire models and advancing our knowledge of how fires affect vegetation and terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle using offline simulations of land models or DGVMs. Now, we’re bringing FireMIP into CMIP7. It represents a groundbreaking initiative aimed at enhancing fire modeling in coupled models and quantitatively understanding fire dynamics and the role of fire in the Earth system, alongside the associated uncertainties, based on multi-model ensembles.

The primary objectives of FireMIP are to:

1. Analyze the evolution of fire regimes from the past to the present and project future changes under various climate and socio-economic scenarios, while accounting for uncertainties;
2. Assess fire simulations in CMIP7 coupled models (ESMs) and identify/understand biases to guide further development of modeling fire and its influences;
3. Quantify the cross-sphere effects of fires and fire changes on ecosystems (e.g., carbon cycle, vegetation structure), climate (e.g., temperature, atmosphere circulation, water cycle, permafrost), and the environment (e.g., air quality), both locally and remotely, and elucidate the underlying mechanisms.

Scientific Steering Committee

Name	Affiliation	Role	Contact
Fang Li	Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences	Co-chair
Stijn Hantson	Universidad del Rosario	Co-chair
Pep Canadell	CSIRO	Member
Stephanie Fiedler	GEOMAR	Member
David Lawrence	NCAR	Member
James Randerson	UC Irvine	Member
Apostolos Voulgarakis	Imperial College London	Member

Advisory Group

Robert Allen	Chantelle Burton	Kece Fei
Huilin Huang	Douglas Kelley	Jin-Soo Kim
Peter Lawrence	Hanna Lee	Wei Li
Keren Mezuman	Lars Nieradzik	Sam S. Rabin
Brendan Rogers	Jörg Schwinger	Maria Val Martin
Daniel S. Ward	Chao Wu	Jiangwen Zhu

Protocol (preliminary)

Variables

Required: burned area and fire carbon emissions (preferably both)

Optional: Climate and biogeochemical variables from the DECK, Fast Track, and other MIPs in CMIP7, e.g., temperature, precipitation, geopotential height, radiation, SST, GPP, NEP, LAI, atmospheric CO₂ concentration (if modeled), air-sea carbon exchange flux (if modeled), … (will be updated in the future).

Experiments

Required: Historical, Future (at least one CMIP7 ScenarioMIP scenario)

Optional:

1. Present-day influence of fires (at least one): no-fire, no-fire-emis, no-fire-aero
2. Influence of fire or fire emission changes (at least one group):
   • fire-1850s, fire-2010s, fire-2100s
   • fire-emis-1850s, fire-emis-2010s, fire-emis-2100s
   • fire-aero-1850s, fire-aero-2010s, fire-aero-2100s
3. we could use the outputs of your AR7 Fast Track experiments to investigate the influence of CO₂ levels and anthropogenic forcers on fires.

Participation

Participation in FireMIP is voluntary and open.