Identification

Title

High-latitude cooling associated with landscape changes from North American boreal forest fires

Abstract

Fires in the boreal forests of North America are generally stand-replacing, killing the majority of trees and initiating succession that may last over a century. Functional variation during succession can affect local surface energy budgets and, potentially, regional climate. Burn area across Alaska and Canada has increased in the last few decades and is projected to be substantially higher by the end of the 21st century because of a warmer climate with longer growing seasons. Here we simulated changes in forest composition due to altered burn area using a stochastic model of fire occurrence, historical fire data from national inventories, and succession trajectories derived from remote sensing. When coupled to an Earth system model, younger vegetation from increased burning cooled the high-latitude atmosphere, primarily in the winter and spring, with noticeable feedbacks from the ocean and sea ice. Results from multiple scenarios suggest that a doubling of burn area would cool the surface by 0.23 ± 0.09 °C across boreal North America during winter and spring months (December through May). This could provide a negative feedback to winter warming on the order of 3-5% for a doubling, and 14-23% for a quadrupling, of burn area. Maximum cooling occurs in the areas of greatest burning, and between February and April when albedo changes are largest and solar insolation is moderate. Further work is needed to integrate all the climate drivers from boreal forest fires, including aerosols and greenhouse gasses.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7pr7wt3

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2013-02-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact