HR: 0800h
AN: B41B-0107    [Abstracts]
TI: Modeling the Dynamics of Wildfire in the North American Boreal Forest
AU: * Balshi, M S
EM: ftmsb@uaf.edu
AF: Department of Biology and Wildlife, University of Alaska Fairbanks , Fairbanks, AK 99775 United States
AU: McGuire, A D
EM: ffadm@uaf.edu
AF: Department of Biology and Wildlife, University of Alaska Fairbanks , Fairbanks, AK 99775 United States
AU: Duffy, P A
EM: fspad4@uaf.edu
AF: Department of Forest Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK 99775 United States
AB: In the boreal forest, where carbon stores are large, wildfire is a common occurrence, and changes in the fire regime have consequences for water, energy, and trace gas feedbacks to the climate system. Although fire is common, the underlying mechanisms that influence the fire regime at large scales are incompletely understood. Because changes in fire regime have implications for the climate system, it is important to develop a predictive capability to simulate the response of fire regime to future climate changes. In this study, we developed a fire model with large spatial coverage and compared the simulations of area burned in Alaska and Canada between 1959 and 1995 to observations over that period. This comparison verified that the model accurately represents the fire regime of the North American boreal forest. We coupled the fire model to the terrestrial ecosystem model (TEM) and simulated carbon dynamics of Alaska and Canada for the period 1860-1995. The carbon dynamics simulated for Alaska and Canada were similar to the carbon dynamics of a simulation that was driven by observed fire history from 1959-1995. Our next step in this study is to use the coupled model to evaluate carbon dynamics for future scenarios of climate change.
DE: 1699 General or miscellaneous
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting