NCEO Land Science Meeting, 28-29 February 2012, Sheffield, UK

1. Land cover & fire at high latitudes: model-data comparison and model modification E.Kantzas, M. Lomas, S.Quegan National Centre for Earth Observation-CTCD University of Sheffield NCEO Land Science Meeting, 28-29 February 2012, Sheffield, UK

2. What is MONARCH-A •MONitoring and Assessing Regional Climate change in High latitudes and the Arctic. •Generate an information package of multidisciplinary ECVs associated with terrestrial carbon and water fluxes at high latitudes. • Goals: • Synthesize available data sets • Generation of time series • Interface ECVs with models

3. ATMOSPHERIC CO2 Photosynthesis GPP BIOPHYSICS NPP Soil Litter Land Surface Carbon Model Fire Mortality GROWTH Thinning Disturbance NBP Biomass LEACHED

4. Representation of NBP in 3 models • Differences in Net Biome Production between • the 3 models in • Magnitude • Spatial distribution • Trend

5. Vegetation Cover N. America GlobCover GLC2000 • Significant differences exist between data sets. • Translating land classes into model PFTs is liable to user interpretation.

6. Driving SDGVM with Land Cover • Driving model with different land • cover data sets had the following • carbon effects: • Up to 50% differences in fire emissions • Up to 20% differences in net carbon uptake

7. Burned Area & Fire Emissions • Models cannot capture the temporal and spatial variability of fire which leads to: • Underestimation of inter-annual variability of land-atmosphere carbon exchange • Inability of models to simulate the effects of fire disturbance on permafrost.

8. BurnedArea, Models & Data

9. Model Modification I Method: By adding a probabilistic component to the algorithm which controls fire occurrence, simulated fire regime resembled GFED data. Due to the lack of an energy balance model no feedbacks of fire disturbance were observed on permafrost despite fire events removing up to 30% of cover.

10. Model Modification II Burned Area Mhc Method: For each site the GFED data variance was added to model variance which lead to the model exhibiting similar variability to data. Fire emissions variance increased but the inter-annual variability of NBP remained largely unaffected.

11. Fire Emissions Parameterization

12. Fire Emissions Parameterization

13. Emissions per Burnt Area Eurasia N. America

14. Conclusions • Driving a model with different land cover significantly affects fire emissions and to some extent carbon uptake in boreal latitudes. • The spatial and temporal variability in fire occurrence at high latitudes is not captured by C models so fire-permafrost interactions are not simulated. • Different process representations lead to radically different total fire emissions and emissions per unit burnt area. In Progress • Improve parameterization of the probabilistic component in the fire algorithm to better describe the inter-annual and spatial variability of fire emissions and land-atmosphere carbon exchange. • Define first qualitatively and then quantitatively modelled fire emissions. • After establishing a realistic fire disturbance framework, evaluate fire-permafrost interactions.

15. Thank You