Modelling fires in the terrestrial carbon balance by incorporating SPITFIRE into the global vegetation model ORCHIDEE – Part 1: Simulating historical global burned area and fire regime

Abstract

Fire is an important global ecological process that determines the distribution of biomes, with consequences for carbon, water, and energy budgets. The modelling of fire is critical for understanding its role in both historical and future changes in terrestrial ecosystems and the climate system. This study incorporates the process-based prognostic fire module SPITFIRE into the global vegetation model ORCHIDEE, which was then used to simulate the historical burned area and the fire regime for the 20th century. For 2001-2006, the simulated global spatial extent of fire occurrence agrees well with that given by the satellite-derived burned area datasets (L3JRC, GLOB10 CARBON, GFED3.1) and captures 78-92% of global total burned area depending on which dataset is used for comparison. The simulated global annual burned area is 329 Mha yr-1, which falls within the range of 287-384 Mha yr-1 given by the three global observation datasets and is close to the 344 Mha yr-1 given by GFED3.1 data when crop fires are excluded.