A44E-05
Development of a region-specific fire scheme in the CESM framework
Thursday, 17 December 2015: 17:00
3002 (Moscone West)
Yufei Zou1, Yuhang Wang2, Ziming Ke1 and Yongjia Song3, (1)Georgia Institute of Technology Main Campus, Atlanta, GA, United States, (2)Georgia Institute of Technology Main Campus, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Atlanta, GA, United States, (3)Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States
Abstract:
Wildfire plays an important role in modulating regional to global climate through perturbations on multiple physical and biogeochemical processes in the earth system. However, fire modeling is still a large source of uncertainty in current earth system models due to its broad spatial and temporal variability with complex region-specific characteristics. To improve the modeling capability for fire activities and climate-fire interactions, we newly develop in the CESM framework a region-specific fire scheme that is coupled with CAM5 and CLM4.5 models. The new fire scheme improves fire modeling performance in both offline and online simulations in comparison to the observations. New functionality of the fire scheme enables assessments of climate feedbacks to fire activities. The inclusion of fire emission and plume rise modules also enable fire feedbacks to climate through aerosol radiative and cloud forcing. The new implementation lays the foundation for interactive fire-climate studies using the CESM.
