Developing projected catalogs

The 10,000-year catalog in the Verisk Wildfire Model for the United States contains 10,000 simulated years; any one of which could occur in the current climate. Assuming the inventory of years is sufficient to represent a future climate, a sample of 10,000 years can be selected to create a new catalog that can be used to compute future loss exceedance probability (EP) distributions. Here, the sample is selected so that the relative change in average annual burned fraction at each ecoregion is equal to those for a specific scenario and time-horizon.

The sampling is performed to create catalogs for the four SSP-RCPs for time-horizons 2030 and 2050. The resulting projected catalogs cover global warming levels from +1.5°C to +2.4°C. Global warming levels (°C) by scenario and time-horizon relative to the pre-industrial (1850-1899) mean based on the mean of the six GCMs used to create the Climate Change Projections. gives the global warming levels that each projected catalog represents. These levels are relative to pre-industrial levels (1850-1899). They are the mean of the levels from the six GCMs computed using CMIP6 data sourced from the University of Melbourne (Nicholls et al, 2020).

Due to the significant uncertainty in projecting wildfire risk beyond 2050 it is decided to limit the Climate Change Projections for U.S. Wildfire to time-horizons up to and including 2050. Climate change projections representing scenarios beyond 2050 can be created and interested readers should contact their Verisk representative to find out more information.