Extending MESMER-X: A spatially resolved Earth system model emulator for fire weather and soil moisture

Abstract

Abstract. Climate emulators are models calibrated on Earth System Models (ESMs) to replicate their behaviour. Thanks to their low computational cost, these tools are becoming increasingly important to accelerate the exploration of emission scenarios and the coupling of climate information to other models. However, the emulation of regional climate extremes and water cycle variables has remained challenging. The MESMER emulator was recently expanded to represent regional temperature extremes in the new “MESMER-X” version, which is targeted at impact-related variables, including extremes. This paper presents a further expansion of MESMER-X to represent indices related to fire weather and soil moisture. Given a trajectory of global mean temperature, the extended emulator generates spatially-resolved realisations for the seasonal average of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI), the number of days with extreme fire weather, the annual average of the soil moisture and the annual minimum of the monthly average soil moisture. For each ESM, the emulations mimic the statistical distributions and the spatial patterns of these indicators. For each of the four variables considered, we calculate how much do the quantiles of the emulations deviate from those of the ESMs, resulting in good performances. Moreover, we argue that this framework can be expanded to further variables, given that it works over a large range of annual indicators. Overall, the now expanded MESMER-X emulator can emulate several climate variables, including climate extremes and soil moisture availability, and is a useful tool for the exploration of regional climate changes and their impacts.

Projected future climatic forcing on the global distribution of vegetation types

“…The boreal biome provides a number of ecosystem services, including timber forest products, amenities and carbon sequestration, which stand to become depleted as the biome wanes. It is also highly prone to disturbances from fire and pests [76,77], including recent record wildfires that are projected to intensify [77][78][79] as higher latitudes warm much faster than the global average, threatening regions of the biome that remain. Increased efforts should therefore be made to protect boreal and tundra biomes specifically, but this will need to take into account the geographical shifts these biomes may make over the next 500 years.…”