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Abstract:
Quantification of the role of fire within the Earth system requires an adequate representation
of fire as a climate-controlled process within an Earth system model. To be able to address questions on the
interaction between fire and the Earth system, we implemented the mechanistic fire model SPITFIRE, in
JSBACH, the land surface model of the MPI Earth system model. Here, we document the model implementation
as well as model modifications. We evaluate our model results by comparing the simulation to the
GFED version 3 satellite-based data set. In addition, we assess the sensitivity of the model to the meteorological
forcing and to the spatial variability of a number of fire relevant model parameters. A first comparison
of model results with burned area observations showed a strong correlation of the residuals with wind
speed. Further analysis revealed that the response of the fire spread to wind speed was too strong for the
application on global scale. Therefore, we developed an improved parametrization to account for this effect.
The evaluation of the improved model shows that the model is able to capture the global gradients and the
seasonality of burned area. Some areas of model-data mismatch can be explained by differences in vegetation
cover compared to observations. We achieve benchmarking scores comparable to other state-of-theart
fire models. The global total burned area is sensitive to the meteorological forcing. Adjustment of parameters
leads to similar model results for both forcing data sets with respect to spatial and seasonal patterns
