Global fire emissions, fire area burned and air quality data projected using a global earth system model (RCP45/SSP1 and RCP8.5/SSP3)

This project provided an integrated assessment of the effects of fires under different future climate and population scenarios on fine particulate matter mass (PM2.5) and ozone (O3) at global scale, with a particular focus on the United States. We employed the global Community Earth System Model (CESM) with the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) climate, anthropogenic emissions and land use, and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) population projections (i.e., RCP4.5/SSP1 and RCP8.5/SSP3). Within CESM, we used a complex-based fire parameterization to project future climate- and human-driven fire emissions, and considered landscape, deforestation, agricultural and peat fires. This data publication includes a) fire emissions for main fire species such as black carbon (BC), monoterpenes, carbon monoxide (CO), isoprene, Hydrogen cyanide (HCN), ammonia (NH3), nitric oxide (NO), organic carbon (OC), sulfur dioxide (SO2), etc.; b) area burned from landscape, agriculture, deforestation and peat fires; and c) air quality (PM2.5, BC, OC and O3). All data are at a global scale 0.9 x 1.25 horizontal resolution, with either monthly, daily or hourly resolution at decadal snapshots, i.e. 2000 Baseline (2000-2010), 2050 RCP45 and RCP85 (2040-2050) and 2100 RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 (2090-2100). All simulations were performed with CESM 1.2 with a fire module described in Li et al. (2012 and 2013).
Data were created to investigate the effect of changing climate on future fire activity and its consequences for air pollution.
Original metadata and publication date was 05/07/2018. Two of the data files included in this data publication were found to contain only zeros, so on 06/15/2018 this publication was updated to include the corrected netCDF files containing fire area burned for RCP45/SSP1 and RCP85/SSP3 scenarios. We discovered and corrected a file duplication error with these same fire area burned files on 06/10/2021. Some additional minor metadata updates were also made.