CMIP3 / CMIP5 app - Area burned and fire frequency
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Total area burned in km per shapefile region and number of unique fires are annual scale statistics, unlike the current climate variables which are monthly (and seasonal). Options to select months and/or define seasons should be restricted now to climate datasets only, as they are not applicable to annual scale Alfresco outputs.
Area burned and fire frequency are also spatially pre-aggregated. Unlike the climate variables, temperature and precipitation, whose values vary across space and allow for computing various quantiles of the data across space, area burned and fire frequency are already integrations across space. There is no varying of values from pixel to pixel in the same sense as for climate data.
However, Alfresco outputs have multiple simulation replicates, which can be envisioned as a spatial overlay of multiple realizations of these regional scale statistics. For this reason, the various quantiles computed for temperature and precipitation can also be computed for area burned, though they will have a different meaning.
These statistics will be available as totals for entire geographic regions, but will also be broken out further by vegetation class.
Fire size distributions will be another, more fundamental, statistic made available, also broken out by vegetation class. Fire count and burn area can of course be computed directly from a distribution of fire sizes. This is what will provide vegetation-specific statistics for all three variables in a given region.
Vegetation-specific fire size distributions will also be accompanied by a vector of unique fire IDs so that regional fire counts integrated across vegetation classes can be computed from a collection of individual vegetation-specific fire sizes without redundant counting of unique fires. While total fire count and burn area integrated across vegetation in a region may continue to be pre-compiled and stored separately, this approach for regional fire count is required if working strictly with vegetation-specific fire size distributions.
Alfresco outputs will be incorporated into a next gen app.