Online seminar by Dr. Fang Li from International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
26 June 2025
KST 14:00
The Online seminar is being held in Room 1010 (Jasmin) – Integrated mechanical engineering building. Click here for the campus map.
You can also join us online: https://pusan.zoom.us/j/82039766742?pwd=CtKztY4X6piJaLD5PmiXC7vdL3KQAu.1
Fire is the primary terrestrial ecosystem disturbance on a global scale and an important Earth system process. lt is regulated by climate and weather, vegetation characteristics, and human activities, and influences them in multiple ways, resulting in intricate feedback loops. Developing fire models in Earth system models (ESMs)is essential for reliable fire historical reconstruction and future projections, quantifying fire impacts on climate, ecosystems, and biogeochemical cycles, and understanding the underlying mechanisms. The Li fire model, most widely used in CMP6 ESMs, addressed three critical issues identified in the CMlP5: (1) simulated global burned area less than half of the observations, (2) failure to reproduce the high burned area fraction observed in Africa, and (3) weak fire seasonal variability. However, it and other fire models commonly fail to reproduce the decline in global burned area observed in the recent decades and the spring fire peak in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) mid-latitudes, and underestimate the fire sensitivity to wet-dry conditions. Here, we introduce updates to the Li scheme (i.e., Li2024 fire scheme), including: (1) modifying burned area basic equations to account for multiday fires, (2) including the influence of landscape fragmentation, (3)developing fuel wetness estimates, (4) developing the estimates on dependence of peat fires, crop fires, and deforestation fires on climate, (5)improving the fire seasonality in managed cropland, (6) recalibrating parameters based on the latest observations, and (7) updating emission factors of biomass burning induced trace gas and aerosol emissions in the interactive fire emission module. The new version estimates a global burned area of 772 Mha/yr and fire carbon emissions of 2.9 Pg C/yr for 2001 to2014, closely aligning with the latest satellite-based GFED5 product. It also successfully reproduces the recent decline in burned area and the spring fire peak in the NH mid-latitudes, and improves the accuracy of spatial inter-annual, and seasonal variability simulations by over 15%. The improvement is especially notable in the Arctic-boreal zone.