Fire dynamics during the 20th century simulated by the Community
Land Model Fire is an integral Earth System process that
interacts with climate in multiple ways. Here we assessed the
parametrization of fires in the Community Land Model (CLM-CN)
and improved the ability of the model to reproduce contemporary
global patterns of burned areas and fire emissions. In addition
to wildfires we extended CLM-CN to account for fires related to
deforestation. We compared contemporary fire carbon emissions
predicted by the model to satellite-based estimates in terms of
magnitude and spatial extent as well as interannual and seasonal
variability. Long-term trends during the 20th century were
compared with historical estimates. Overall we found the best
agreement between simulation and observations for the fire
parametrization based on the work by Arora and Boer (2005). We
obtained substantial improvement when we explicitly considered
human caused ignition and fire suppression as a function of
population density. Simulated