Collaborative Research: Fire at the Intersection of Global Carbon and Water Cycles

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Available estimates of the contribution of forest and wildfires on atmospheric carbon emission budgets may be as high as 40% of the global annual fossil fuel carbon emissions. Climate change scenarios, for example in fire prone regions such as the western continental United States, suggest elevated spring and summertime temperatures, reduced moisture through shorter snowpack melt duration which may lead to longer wildfire seasons acting over increasingly large areas. The premise advanced in this work to be conducted by a multi-disciplinary team of investigators is that fire may mediate several important feedbacks between the terrestrial carbon and water cycles, yet has not yet been seriously considered in coupled carbon-climate models. As well as the direct modulation of fire effects by precipitation, drought, soil moisture, together with a host of human activities ranging from land use changes, deforestation, pasture maintenance and agricultural practice, a range of biogeochemical and ecosystem feedbacks centered on the carbon and water cycles will be examined. The approach of this effort is to improve the representation of fire and fire-related processes within the specific framework of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) Common Land Model Carbon and Nitrogen (CLM-CN) model, maintained and developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). As well as progress towards achieving several modeling objectives, this effort will combine a number of educational activities, programs and workshops with an explicit intent of contributing to future IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assessments. This work is supported under the NSF Carbon and Water in the Earth System solicitation, an interdisciplinary funding opportunity from the Directorate of Geosciences.