Extending MESMER-X: a spatially resolved Earth system model emulator for fire weather and soil moisture

Abstract

Climate emulators are models calibrated on Earth system models (ESMs) to replicate their behavior. Thanks to their low computational cost, these tools are becoming increasingly important to accelerate the exploration of emission scenarios and the coupling of climate information to other models. However, the emulation of regional climate extremes and water cycle variables has remained challenging. The MESMER emulator was recently expanded to represent regional temperature extremes in the new “MESMER-X” version, which is targeted at impact-related variables, including extremes. This paper presents a further expansion of MESMER-X to represent indices related to fire weather and soil moisture. Given a trajectory of global mean temperature, the extended emulator generates spatially resolved realizations for the seasonal average of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI), the number of days with extreme fire weather, the annual average of the soil moisture, and the annual minimum of the monthly average soil moisture. For each ESM, the emulations mimic the statistical distributions and the spatial patterns of these indicators. For each of the four variables considered, we evaluate the performances of the emulations by calculating how much their quantiles deviate from those of the ESMs. Given how it performs over a large range of annual indicators, we argue that this framework can be expanded to further variables. Overall, the now expanded MESMER-X emulator can emulate several climate variables, including climate extremes and soil moisture availability, and is a useful tool for the exploration of regional climate changes and their impacts.