State of Wildfires 2023-24 - ConFire data

ISIMIP3a

The isimip3a directory follows the structure: <<experiment>>/<<reanalysis_source>>/period_yyyy_yyyy/.

• <<experiment>>: Can be either:

• obsclim: Reanalysis targeting observed climate.
• counterclim: Detrended obsclim approximating climate without climate change.

• <<reanalysis_source>>: Currently contains only GSWP3-W5E5, with more sources to follow in subsequent years.
• yyyy_yyyy: Corresponds to the year range.

For attribution experiments in the report, the following directories are used:

• Factual: obsclim/GSWP3-W5E5/period_2002_2019/
• Counterfactual: counterclim/GSWP3-W5E5/period_2002_2019/
• Early Industrial: counterclim/GSWP3-W5E5/period_1901_1920/

Additional details on setting the temporal range for the report can be found here.

ISIMIP3b

The isimip3b directory structure is similar to ISIMIP3a: <<experiment>>/<<GCM>>/period_yyyy_yyyy/.

• <<experiment>> includes:

• historical: Historical GCM output.
• ssp126
• ssp370
• ssp585

• <<GCM>>: Refers to the General Circulation Model used.
• yyyy_yyyy: Corresponds to the year range.

Both ISIMIP3a and ISIMIP3b contain the same NetCDF files, as follows:

Outputs

Outputs contain the ConFire outputs when driven with the provided datasets. The directories are named according to the regions, and for each region, there are four sets of outputs:

• isimip-evaluation1
• isimip-final.tar
• nrt-evaluation1
• nrt-final

Each of these directories contains the following files necessary for rerunning the model without redoing the optimization. While you are unlikely to need to look at these files, they are useful for setting up your own model experiments (see the ConFire configuration settings):

• scalers-_*.csv
• trace-_*.nc
• variables_info-_*.txt

Additionally, there are two other directories:

• figs: Contains automatically generated figures and some of their outputs.
• sample: Contains model outputs.

Within the sample directory, there is a subdirectory indicating the model run name, which contains a series of experiments. These experiments differ for each run (see below), and each experiment contains some or all of the following directories:

• Evaluate: Contains the burnt area from the full model including stochastic parameters. Often used for evaluation (see report supplement for more information).
• Control: Contains burnt area driven purely by driving datasets with stochasticity. Used as the control in most of the analysis.
• Standard_X: A series of directories with burnt areas from individual controls. This describes the burnt area in the presence of that control in otherwise ideal burning conditions. The numbers are:

• 0: Fuel load for all runs
• 1: Fuel moisture for all runs
• 2: Fire weather for NRT and ignitions for ISIMIP3a
• 3: Ignitions for ISIMIP3a and suppression for ISIMIP3a
• 4: Suppression for NRT
• 5: Snow for NRT

Within each of these directories is a series of ensemble members sample-predX.nc. Within the same optimization (i.e., the same model run, so across all experiments), samples are paired, meaning the sample-predX.nc corresponds to the sample in another experiment.

Experiments

isimip-evaluation1 & nrt-evaluation1

The only experiment for evaluation is called baseline, which has an 'Evaluate' and 'Control' run and is used to evaluate the model. Automatically generated evaluation figures can be found in the figs/ directory.

nrt-final

This also contains only one run, baseline, but includes runs for each of the controls.

isimip-final

This has more runs:

• factual: Uses the ISIMIP3a obsclim driving dataset (see driving dataset above).
• counterfactual: Uses the ISIMIP3a counterclim dataset.
• early_industrial: Uses the early period ISIMIP3a counterclim dataset.
• historical/<<GCM>>/, ssp126/<<GCM>>/, ssp370/<<GCM>>/, ssp585/<<GCM>>/: Uses the ISIMIP3b datasets outlined above, where <<GCM>> is one of each of the five GCMs used in ISIMIP3b.

Additional Analysis

The analysis in the report also utilizes 95th and 90th percentile burnt area totals. These aren't as neatly organized as the NetCDF files yet, but we’re getting there. They can be found in:

figs/ _13-frac_points_0.5-<<experiment>>-control_TS/<<GCM>>-control_TS/pc-%%/ points-<<run>>.csv