THE SMOKE AND EMISSIONS MODEL INTERCOMPARISION PROJECT

Fire emissions and smoke impacts from wildland fires are a growing concern due to increasing fire season severity, the public’s dwindling tolerance of smoke, more rigorous air quality regulation, and fire’s role in climate change issues. While numerous smoke and emissions models are available to address these issues, a lack of quantitative information on the limitations of smoke and emissions models impedes the use of these tools in real-world applications. To date, no rigorous quantitative assessment has been performed on these models, and decision makers and regulators have received little or no guidance on the strengths, limitations, and uncertainties of these models in real-world situations (Joint Fire Science Program 2007). Both the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) and the interagency Office of the Federal Coordinator (OFCM) Joint Action Group (JAG) for the Wildland Fire Weather Needs Assessment agree that a significant need exists to define the current state of the science and the limitations of fire emissions and smoke models, and to compile more comprehensive observational data to further model development and validation (Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research 2007). Model intercomparisons are a useful way to determine the strengths and limitations of a model, to discover why different models produce different output in response to the same input, and to identify aspects of the simulations in which “consensus” in model predictions or common problematic features exist. Highly successful intercomparison projects for global circulation models, including the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) (Gates et al. 1992, 1999) and its successor, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) (Meehl et al. 2007), have established a precedent for other