We report global annual mean radiative forcing (in W) per m2
of burned area. By
’global’ we mean, for example, that we considered the perturbation to the Earth’s total
radiation budget from CO2 pulse released by the fire mixing uniformly throughout the
atmosphere. Similarly, for the aerosol and ozone forcings, the mixing pattern was nonuniform,
and so we summed the perturbation from the fire to the radiation budget across
the Earth’s entire surface (across all of the atmospheric model grid cells). As described
above, the radiative forcing estimates in Table 1 and throughout the main text include
stratospheric adjustment, and so to compare directly with Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change Third Assessment Report estimates (1) they should be divided by the
area of the earth. More detailed information about our approach for estimating radiative