Simulated annual area burned for eleven extensively forested ecoregions in the western United States for 1980 – 2099

This data release provides output produced by a statistical, aridity threshold fire model for 11 extensively forested ecoregions in the western United States. We identified thresholds in fire-season climate water deficit (FSCWD) that distinguish years with limited, moderate, and extensive area burned for each ecoregion. We developed a new area burned model using these relationships and used it to simulate annual area burned using historical climate from 1980 – 2020 and output from global climate models (GCMs) from 1980 – 2099. The data release includes a comparison of mean annual FSCWD for 13 GCMs that we used to select five GCMs that bracket the range of conditions projected for the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario. We used the aridity thresholds to classify each simulation year as having limited, moderate, or extensive area burned and defined fire-size distributions from historical fire records for these categories. We simulated individual fires from a regression relating fire season aridity to the annual number of fires and drew fire sizes from the corresponding fire-size distributions. For each ecoregion, we produced 1000 replicate simulations of annual area burned (ha).