Copernicus Anthropogenic CO₂ Emissions Monitoring & Verification Support (CO2MVS) capacity: new and innovative methods to estimate the impact of fires on vegetation and related carbon fluxes

Expected Outcome

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Enable accounting for the interaction between droughts, fires and vegetation in the CO2MVS capacity;
• Improve the estimation of fire emissions in the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS);
• Improve the fire risk forecasting in the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS);
• Improve the assimilation of Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) products in vegetation fire impact and carbon fluxes assessments.

Scope

The areas of R&I to address the above expected outcomes include:

• Better understand and characterise the impact of wildfires on the carbon cycle and on anthropogenic emissions through land use change. This has been recognized especially in the climate community when developing process-based vegetation models for use in climate models. While a large variety of empirical or process-based vegetation models exist today, it is still unclear which type of model or degree of complexity is required to model fire adequately at regional to global scales. International collaborations, such as the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP), have evaluated existing global fire models against benchmark data sets for present-day and historical conditions;
• Investigate the current state of fire modelling and specifically how the interaction between droughts, fires and vegetation can be accounted for in a global monitoring system, such as the CO2MVS. Because of the monitoring aspects of the CO2MVS, use should be made, where possible, of including observation-based data sets representing certain aspects of the fire-vegetation interaction;
• Investigate how a better understanding of the impact of fires on vegetation can improve the estimates of fire emissions of chemical species and aerosols, and subsequently air quality products in CAMS and the fire risk forecasting in CEMS.

Wildfires have become widespread during summer over many regions of the world, including Europe, and have major safety and larger societal impacts (air quality and health, aviation, weather, agriculture, etc). Wildfires and biomass burning are significant sources of CO2 and air pollutants in the atmosphere. Fires also change the vegetation and therefore affect the exchange of CO2 between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Current vegetation and fire models need to be improved to refine the quality of CAMS products (air quality, emissions), the Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) supporting CEMS and forcing data sets for climate projections supporting the IPCC. Innovative methodologies should be investigated to include fire-vegetation interactions, also taking into account the impact of drought conditions in global monitoring systems such as the CO2MVS capacity, via the improvement of currently used process-based vegetation models or through empirical models. The use of relevant observation-based data sets (e.g. vegetation states, drought conditions, burnt areas) should be a key element of these methodologies. Current CLMS products should be considered, including options for potential improved specifications. The proposal should include some demonstrations of downstream applications that would benefit from these improvements.

The transfer of research results to operations should receive active attention during the project to strengthen the readiness for an operational deployment in the future. Appropriate involvement and/or interaction with, and/or coordination across the relevant Entrusted Entities of the Copernicus services, the conditions for making available, for re-using and exploiting the results (including IPR) by the said entities must be addressed during the project implementation. Software should be open licensed.

The possible participation of the JRC may consist in (1) ensuring access to relevant models, tools and datasets of the operational CEMS, (2) providing a good understanding of existing operational workflows for CEMS and advice regarding the operational feasibility of new developments and (3) testing of new developments/prototypes for CEMS in a pre-operational setting.

In this topic, the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content should be addressed only if relevant in relation to the objectives of the research effort.

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Activities are expected to achieve TRL 5-6 by the end of the project. The reference TRL definition is the ISO 16290:2013 applicable to the space sector. Activities may start at any TRL.