Research has traditionally focused on the wildfire impacts of climate and vegetation, using the approaches developed mainly based on empirical and statistical weather–fire behavior relationships as well as empirical and process-based vegetation–fire relationships. Recent studies have turned more attention to the feedbacks of fires to climate and ecosystems (Liu et al 2013). A most sophisticated tool for understanding the complex interactions is Earth system modeling such as the Community Earth System Model (CESM) (Hurrell et al 2013). An Earth system model includes atmospheric models to provide the environmental conditions for wildfires such as droughts, to simulate atmospheric radiation and climate effects of fire carbon and particle emissions, and to calculate the disturbances in land-air fluxes due to fire induced changes in vegetation coverage, albedo and roughness. An Earth system model also includes vegetation models such as dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) (Bachelet et al 2001) to simulate the carbon, water and nitrogen cycles in the terrestrial ecosystems driven by atmospheric chemistry, climate, land-use and land-cover types and disturbances such as fires.