Modelling interactive fires: climate-fire feedbacks on fire characteristics and multi-model projects

There are multiple feedback mechanisms between wildfires and climate, such as temperature, emissions, cloud interactions, deposition, and land cover changes. Wildfires can also have large societal and ecological impacts and are considered as an extreme climate event. Despite this, most Earth System Models have, until recently, used prescribed fire emissions and fire plume injection heights for input into their atmospheric models that were unresponsive to climate changes. Fire plume heights, in particular, have a great influence on the radiative forcing and long-range transport of pollutants. This presentation will show recent results from global modelling of interactive fires (land-atmosphere) in the Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM), with a focus on key wildfire characteristics, such as aerosol emissions and fire plume height. These model improvements introduce the capacity to more accurately simulate future projections of wildfire characteristics under different climate scenarios. The upcoming applications of these improvements include experiments for the Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution (HTAP) Fires project, AerChemMIP2, and Aerocom. HTAP Fires is a multi-model, multi-pollutant study with the goal of improving global fire modelling and using the multi-model ensembles to provide estimates of fire-related pollution for impact studies and policy makers.