- 1Lund University, Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund, Sweden (lars.nieradzik@nateko.lu.se)
- 2Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
- 3NORCE Climate, Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway
- 4Earth and Environmental Engineering Department, Columbia University, NY, USA
- 5Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark
Within the framework of the project PolarRES (POLAR Regions in the Earth System) we assess the impact of climate change on the ecosystems of the terrestrial northern high latitudes by making use of a range of high resolution regional climate simulations. These regional simulations were themselves driven by global climate simulations selected following the storyline approach described in Levine et al. 2024 from the set of CMIP6 SSP3-7.0 simulations, namely NorESM2-MM and CNRM-ESM2-1. These define two extremes in the climatic envelope of the CMIP6 simulations. While NorESM2-MM shows a high warming of the Barents-Kara seas but a low Arctic tropospheric warming CNRM-ESM2-1 shows the opposite. The storyline approach is a comprehensive way of defining pathways for physical outcomes of climate change that are observable in the region of interest and can directly be linked to certain consequences.
The 2nd generation Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) LPJ-GUESS with its wildfire model SIMFIRE-BLAZE was applied using the high-resolution meteorological forcing from the regional climate models (RCMs) to investigate the potential impacts on both vegetation and the development of wildfires as well as the role of uncertainty implied by the variability of the forcing data.
It can clearly be stated that wildfire activity will increase significantly under the given scenarios driven mainly by shifts in vegetation distribution, i.e. northward migration of both treeline as well as shrubs and grasses. These effects differ regionally, depending on both, the storyline and the RCMs.
We present the findings from an envelope of potential future climate forcings depicting the impact of climate depending on the regionally observable effects of Arctic tropospheric warming and the Barents-Kara Seas warming, making use of the storyline approach as a comprehensive indicator for regional future change.
The results of this assessment will directly influence the research conducted in the project GreenFeedBack (GREENhouse gas fluxes and earth-system FEEDBACKs), which focusses on enhancing the knowledge on GHG dynamics in the boreal high latitude terrestrial and marine ecosystems.
Levine, X. Jet al. : Storylines of summer Arctic climate change constrained by Barents–Kara seas and Arctic tropospheric warming for climate risk assessment, Earth Syst. Dynam., 15, 1161–1177, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-1161-2024, 2024
How to cite: Nieradzik, L., Lee, H., Levine, X., Miller, P., Mooney, P., Mottram, R., and Wårlind, D.: Assessing the impact of climate change on boreal high latitude wildfire using a storyline approach, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-17962, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-17962, 2025.
