Modelling the role of fires in the terrestrial carbon balance by incorporating SPITFIRE into the global vegetation model ORCHIDEE – Part 1: simulating historical global burned  area and fire regimes

Yue, C.; Ciais, P.; Cadule, P.; Thonicke, K.; Archibald, S.; Poulter, B.; Hao, W. M.; Hantson, S.; Mouillot, F.; Friedlingstein, P.; Maignan, F.; Viovy, N.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-2747-2014

Articles | Volume 7, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-2747-2014

© Author(s) 2014. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-2747-2014

© Author(s) 2014. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 7, issue 6

Development and technical paper

|

21 Nov 2014

Development and technical paper |

| 21 Nov 2014

Modelling the role of fires in the terrestrial carbon balance by incorporating SPITFIRE into the global vegetation model ORCHIDEE – Part 1: simulating historical global burned area and fire regimes

C. Yue, P. Ciais, P. Cadule, K. Thonicke, S. Archibald, B. Poulter, W. M. Hao, S. Hantson, F. Mouillot, P. Friedlingstein, F. Maignan, and N. Viovy

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Final revised paper (published on 21 Nov 2014)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 10 Apr 2014)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC C542: 'Referee comment', Anonymous Referee #1, 13 May 2014
- AC C1733: 'Response to the comments by Anonymous Referee #1, 13 May 2014', Chao Yue, 14 Sep 2014
RC C691: 'review comment', Anonymous Referee #2, 30 May 2014
- AC C1735: 'Response to the comments by Anonymous Referee #2, 30 May 2014', Chao Yue, 14 Sep 2014
SC C771: 'Step in the right direction, but unfortunate that recent improvements to SPITFIRE were not considered', Jed Kaplan, 05 Jun 2014
- AC C1737: 'Response to the comments by Jed O.Kaplan, Mirjam Pfeiffer, and Allan Spessa 05 Jun 2014', Chao Yue, 14 Sep 2014

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Chao Yue on behalf of the Authors (17 Sep 2014) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (24 Sep 2014) by David Lawrence

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (06 Oct 2014)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I sincerely appreciate the responses to reviewer comments and believe the expanded comparisons and discussions strengthen the paper. At this stage I only offer minor technical corrections:

-The responses to ‘multi-day burning’ and revisions are appropriate and appreciated. The explanation in the text, however, is somewhat confusing. It’s not clear which fires from different days are grouped together, and what the term ‘extra fires’ means.

-[pg 24, lines 10-11] This is true (GFED observational dataset doesn’t include fire duration), but not for the reasons listed. The burned area is based on the MCD64A1 MODIS product, which uses a vegetation index-based contextual algorithm to assign burning to 500m pixels. Although informed by active fires, this change index really isn’t capable of giving fire duration information. That would require integration with active-fire based interpolations, which is feasible and an area for future research. The limitation is not really a function of data gaps, cloud cover, etc., as stated in the paper.

[pg 24, lines 12 - 28] This added paragraph is important but not clearly written at present. Please consider some grammatical revisions. Examples include the run-on sentence in lines 25 - 28 and unnecessary comma in line 20. In general the explanation is hard to follow.

-[pg 23, line 11-13] Could consider including the ‘response supplement material’ into the paper’s actual Supplementary material, as it may be interesting to readers who wouldn’t look for the response supplemental material

-[Figure 3] Please include y-axis labels.

-[pg 2, line 14] Inappropriate use of semi-colon. Same in pg 12 line 25, pg 19 line 28, pg 22 lines 23 and 25, pg 27 line 24

-[pg 9, line 13] Change to ‘Evidence shows…’, same in pg 25 line 9

[pg 19, lines 4-15] Here and throughout I would suggest using ‘large fires’ instead of ‘big fires’, which is a little ambiguous.

-[pg 24, line 5] Tilda in 40~60 days should be dash: 40-60 days. Same in pg 25, lines 5 and 7, pg 26 line 10, pg 27 line 24 And I would suggest removing the statement, “if we trust the fire agency data…”. This sounds overly-skeptical and I think generally, especially for the large fires, the estimates are pretty good.

-[pg 24, line 14] The phrase “As our model development is similar to their work” doesn’t make sense in this sentence, since you’re pointing out how it’s in fact different.

-[pg 24, line 18] Remove “essentially” here

-[pg 25, line 11] Can include more recent references: Mu et al. 2011 (10.1029/2011JD016245), Zhang et al. 2012 (10.1029/2012D017459)

-[pg 28, line 14] “Make over-compensation” is not grammatically correct

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (16 Oct 2014)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (16 Oct 2014) by David Lawrence

AR by Chao Yue on behalf of the Authors (21 Oct 2014) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

ORCHIDEE-SPITFIRE model could moderately capture the decadal trend and variation of burned area during the 20th century, and the spatial and temporal patterns of contemporary vegetation fires. The model has a better performance in simulating fires for regions dominated by climate-driven fires, such as boreal forests. However, it has limited capability to reproduce the infrequent but important large fires in different ecosystems, where urgent model improvement is needed in the future.