T 13 Assessment of the status of the development of standards for the terrestrial essential climate variables
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Fire is an important ecosystem disturbance with varying return frequencies, resulting in land cover alteration and change, and atmospheric emissions on multiple time scales. Fire is also an important land management practice and is an important natural abiotic agent in fire dependent ecosystems. Fires not only affect above-ground biomass but also surface and below-ground organic matter such as peat. Information on fire activity is used for global change research, estimating atm ospheric emissions and developing periodic global and regional assessments. It is also used for fire and ecosystem management planning and operational purposes (fire use, preparedness and wildfire suppression) and development of informed policies. The Fire Disturbance Essential Climate Variable includes Burned Area as the primary variable and two supplementary variables: Active Fire and Fire Radiated Power (or Fire Radiative Power - FRP). Burned Area is defined as the area af fected by human-made or natural fire and is expressed in units of area such as hectare (ha) or square kilometre (km2). Active Fire is the location of burning at the time of the observation and is expressed in spatial coordinates or by an indicator of presence of absence of fire in a spatially explicit digital raster map, such as a satellite image. FRP is the rate of emitted radiative energy by the fire at the time of the observation and is expressed in units of power, such as W atts (W).