Inquiries About Burned Area Variable and Fire Duration in FATES Simulation

[rkumar-atmos]

Dear CLM_FATES users,

When I ran a simulation using the I compset (I2000Clm50Fates) for CLM_FATES, I was unable to find a variable explicitly labeled as "burned area" in the outputs. Instead, the output included a variable labeled "FIRE_AREA", with the following description:
float FIRE_AREA(time, lat, lon) ;
FIRE_AREA:long_name = "spitfire fire area:m2" ;
FIRE_AREA:units = "fraction" ;
FIRE_AREA:cell_methods = "time: mean" ;
FIRE_AREA:_FillValue = 1.e+36f ;
FIRE_AREA:missing_value = 1.e+36f ;
Could you kindly confirm whether FIRE_AREA is equivalent to the burned area ? Any further clarification on this would be greatly appreciated.

In the context of working with CLM-FATES, I understand that the fire duration in FATES (when using Spitfire) is set to 240 minutes, while in CLM (using the Li-Fire model), it is set to one day. Could you please clarify how these differing fire duration settings interact when using CLM-FATES for global simulations? Specifically, I am interested in understanding how these different time scales influence the simulation outcomes and the overall dynamics between CLM and FATES.

Thanks,
Kumar