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Biomass burning impacts vegetation dynamics, biogeochemical cycling, atmospheric chemistry, and climate, with sometimes deleterious socio-economic impacts. Under future climate projections it is often expected that the risk of wildfires will increase. Our ability to predict the magnitude and geographic pattern of future fire impacts rests on our ability to model fire regimes, using either well-founded empirical relationships or process-based models with good predictive skill. While a large variety of models exist today, it is still unclear which type of model or degree of complexity is required to model fire adequately at regional to global scales. This is the central question underpinning the creation of the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP), an international initiative to compare and evaluate existing global fire models against benchmark data sets for present-day and historical conditions. In this paper we review how fires have been represented in fire-enabled dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and give an overview of the current state of the art in fire-regime modelling. We indicate which challenges still remain in global fire modelling and stress the need for a comprehensive model evaluation and outline what lessons may be learned from FireMIP.
Biomass burning impacts vegetation dynamics, biogeochemical cycling, atmospheric chemistry, and climate, with sometimes deleterious socio-economic impacts. Under future climate projections it is often expected that the risk of wildfires will increase. Our ability to predict the magnitude and geographic pattern of future fire impacts rests on our ability to model fire regimes, either using well-founded empirical relationships or process-based models with good predictive skill. A large variety of models exist today and it is still unclear which type of model or degree of complexity is required to model fire adequately at regional to global scales. This is the central question underpinning the creation of the Fire Model Intercomparison Project - FireMIP, an international project to compare and evaluate existing global fire models against benchmark data sets for present-day and historical conditions. In this paper we summarise the current state-of-the-art in fire regime modelling and model evaluation, and outline what lessons may be learned from FireMIP.
The important role of fire in regulating vegetation community composition and contributions to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols make it a critical component of dynamic global vegetation models and Earth system models. Over 2 decades of development, a wide variety of model structures and mechanisms have been designed and incorporated into global fire models, which have been linked to different vegetation models. However, there has not yet been a systematic examination of how these different strategies contribute to model performance. Here we describe the structure of the first phase of the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP), which for the first time seeks to systematically compare a number of models. By combining a standardized set of input data and model experiments with a rigorous comparison of model outputs to each other and to observations, we will improve the understanding of what drives vegetation fire, how it can best be simulated, and what new or improved observational data could allow better constraints on model behavior. In this paper, we introduce the fire models used in the first phase of FireMIP, the simulation protocols applied, and the benchmarking system used to evaluate the models. We have also created supplementary tables that describe, in thorough mathematical detail, the structure of each model.