The objective of this PhD project is the development and application of a fully coupled fire-composition-climate Earth system model to quantify the impacts of fire variability on atmospheric composition-climate interactions in present and future worlds.

Figure 1: Burnt area fraction  mean annual average (1997 – 2010) for a) observations (GFED4s) (left panel) and b) UKESM1+INFERNO (right panel).

The initial steps of this project have culminated in the first paper of this PhD, titled “Coupling interactive fire with atmospheric composition and climate in the UK Earth System Model,” which describes the work performed to develop and evaluate a fully coupled fire–climate–composition Earth System model replacing the prescribed transient monthly varying biomass burning emissions in UKESM1. As a result, through atmospheric chemistry and aerosols, the interactive fire emissions can affect radiation and clouds, thereby affecting weather/climate and the meteorological drives of fires themselves. This work has demonstrated that the coupled model has similar performance in reproducing the distribution of aerosols and carbon monoxide atmospheric column. This shows that including INFERNO in UKESM1 (UKESM1+INFERNO) provides a useful coupling framework that allows for an internally consistent representation of complex fire-climate-composition interactions and feedbacks in the Earth System.

Currently, this project is focused on quantify the impacts of fire variability on atmospheric composition-climate interactions using future climate scenarios.