Historical and future anthropogenic warming effects on droughts, fires and fire emissions of CO<sub>2</sub> and PM<sub>2.5</sub> in equatorial Asia when 2015-like El Niño events occur

Shiogama, Hideo; Hirata, Ryuichi; Hasegawa, Tomoko; Fujimori, Shinichiro; Ishizaki, Noriko N.; Chatani, Satoru; Watanabe, Masahiro; Mitchell, Daniel; Lo, Y. T. Eunice

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-11-435-2020

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-11-435-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Large Ensemble Climate Model Simulations: Exploring Natural...

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-11-435-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

Research article

|

15 May 2020

Research article |

| 15 May 2020

Historical and future anthropogenic warming effects on droughts, fires and fire emissions of CO₂ and PM_2.5 in equatorial Asia when 2015-like El Niño events occur

Hideo Shiogama, Ryuichi Hirata, Tomoko Hasegawa, Shinichiro Fujimori, Noriko N. Ishizaki, Satoru Chatani, Masahiro Watanabe, Daniel Mitchell, and Y. T. Eunice Lo

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Preprint (discussion started on 08 Aug 2019)

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Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'review on "Historical and future anthropogenic warming effects on the year 2015 droughts, fires and fire emissions of CO2 and PM2.5 in equatorial Asia"', Anonymous Referee #1, 10 Sep 2019
- AC1: 'Reply to reviewer #1', Hideo Shiogama, 21 Jan 2020
RC2: 'Review of "Historical and future anthropogenic warming effects on the year 2015 droughts, fires and fire emissions of CO2 and PM2.5 in equatorial Asia"', Anonymous Referee #2, 04 Oct 2019
- AC2: 'Reply to the reviewer #2', Hideo Shiogama, 21 Jan 2020
RC3: 'General notes', Anonymous Referee #3, 14 Oct 2019
- AC3: 'Reply to the reviewer #3', Hideo Shiogama, 21 Jan 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (02 Feb 2020) by Nicola Maher

AR by Hideo Shiogama on behalf of the Authors (04 Feb 2020)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (18 Feb 2020) by Nicola Maher

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (28 Feb 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (09 Mar 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Introduction

- Re: We explain the relationships between the 2015 El Niño and drought in lines 36-44 and 139-145. We apologize that our comment wasn’t clear; the description of the 2015 El Niño event in the introduction should not be done in terms of Figure 1, it should be done in terms of relevant literature.

Recommendations:

Stockwell, C. E., Jayarathne, T., Cochrane, M. A., Ryan, K. C., Putra, E. I., Saharjo, B. H., ... & Stone, E. A. (2016). Field measurements of trace gases and aerosols emitted by peat fires in central Kalimantan, Indonesia, during the 2015 El Niño. Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics, 16(18).

Liu, J., Bowman, K. W., Schimel, D. S., Parazoo, N. C., Jiang, Z., Lee, M., ... & O’Dell, C. W. (2017). Contrasting carbon cycle responses of the tropical continents to the 2015–2016 El Niño. Science, 358(6360), eaam5690.

Santoso, A., Mcphaden, M. J., & Cai, W. (2017). The defining characteristics of ENSO extremes and the strong 2015/2016 El Niño. Reviews of Geophysics, 55(4), 1079-1129.

- It’s challenging to follow the added discussion of Lestari et al. 2014 because it comes before the discussion of what is being done [L84]. Additionally, [L72-74] and [L84] are somewhat redundant, could they be combined and could the description of what was and wasn’t done in Lestari et al. 2014 be moved to the discussion section?

Empirical Functions

- The descriptions of Figure 1 and the datasets used should be in this section.

- L135: “the observed △P (△𝜔500) is divided by their standard deviation value.” -> …△P and △𝜔500 are divided…

Results

- It would still be interesting to determine why the 2˚C pathway leads to a less intense SST anomaly, more precipitation, and therefore less change in the fire statistics. Does it have anything to do with the weighted sum? My understanding is that the weighted sum is applied to the RCPs and not the prescribed SSTs, is that correct? [L169]

- I notice the uncertainty range in changes in burn area fraction, CO2 and PM2.5 reach 0% change, but do not go below. Does this indicate there is no chance for smaller-than-observed fire in any scenario? [L223-225]

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (22 Mar 2020) by Nicola Maher

AR by Hideo Shiogama on behalf of the Authors (31 Mar 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (05 Apr 2020) by Nicola Maher

Dear authors,

Please re-read the paper for minor grammatical and wording errors before submitting the final version. Below are some suggested language changes for clarity and to make the manuscript easier to read.

Line 20 - ‘of’ stronger droughts
Line 23 - ‘among’ is not the correct word here, perhaps ‘of’ is better
Line 23-26 is difficult to understand can you reword?
Line 29 – I think that this should this be climate change not climate changes? If you agree please check the entirety of the manuscript for this
Line 37 - ‘a’ weakening
Line 38 - ‘relate’ should be ‘relates’ and perhaps ‘drives’ or ‘corresponds’ would be a better choice of word
Line 45 - ‘loss’ for economy
Line 47 - ‘the’ largest
Line 62 – two sets of large ensembles
Line 63 - ‘are’ historical
Line 129 - ‘consistent’
Line 140 - ‘apply’ is not needed
Line 144 - ‘Should this be ‘it is suggested’ or should it be ‘we show that’
Line 149 - , ‘ one with factual … and one with counter factual’
Line 157 - ‘signal’
Line 158 ‘using an empirical function that estimates x from y’
Line 200 - ‘an’ El Nino
Line 201 – define tropical ocean mean
Line 236 – define major El Nino year
Line 244 - be specific do you mean ‘fire emissions’
Line 266 – Add – These results agree well with Lestart and Yin who also …
Line 283 – This would read better as – ‘Future work to compare … would be useful.’
Caption F4 – What do you mean by omitted? Should this be subtracted?

In general when you say fire or estimates fine (e.g. line 130, and the figure captions) do you mean a specific aspect of fire? If so this should be specified in the text

I additionally ask that you add the following information to the manuscript before publication.

A line or two of discussion about why the probability is smaller for 2degrees of warming than 1.5degrees of warming (see line 215).
A line of discussion on a similar topic for probabilities stated in lines 243-244, the probabilities are not linearly related to the SSP number. Can you suggest why?

Once this is done, I am happy to accept the manuscript as is for publication.

Kind regards,
Nicola Maher

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AR by Hideo Shiogama on behalf of the Authors (07 Apr 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (15 Apr 2020) by Nicola Maher

AR by Hideo Shiogama on behalf of the Authors (16 Apr 2020) Manuscript

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Short summary

Based on climate simulations, we suggested that historical warming increased chances of drought exceeding the severe 2015 event in equatorial Asia due to El Niño. The fire and fire emissions of CO₂/PM_2.5 will largely increase at 1.5 and 2 °C warming. If global warming reaches 3 °C, as is expected from the current mitigation policies, chances of fire and CO₂/PM_2.5 emissions exceeding the 2015 event become approximately 100 %. Future climate policy has to consider these climate change effects.

Historical and future anthropogenic warming effects on droughts, fires and fire emissions of CO2 and PM2.5 in equatorial Asia when 2015-like El Niño events occur

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Historical and future anthropogenic warming effects on droughts, fires and fire emissions of CO₂ and PM_2.5 in equatorial Asia when 2015-like El Niño events occur