Overview

What is SEMIP?

The Smoke and Emission Model Intercomparison Project (SEMIP) is an ongoing community effort to intercompare and evaluate the growing number of fire smoke and fire emissions models that have been developed.  SEMIP is designed to be of use to both the scientific and management communities who need model performance comparisons to be able to better focus new model development and to be able to better utilize existing model output. 

What are SEMIP's Goals?

Specifically, SEMIP will:

• create an open standard for comparing smoke and emissions models both against each other and against real-world observations for use now and into the future through a model intercomparison project;
• perform rigorous evaluations of selected publicly available models through a sequence of standard case studies identified by the open standard; and
• translate results into user-accessible guidance as to which models perform best under which circumstances.

What is happening with SEMIP?

SEMIP is designed to be an ongoing process rather than a specific project.  Currently SEMIP is in its preliminary stages culminating in Phase 1, which is a specific set of comparisons designed to jump-start the overall SEMIP process.  The preliminary stages include:

• creation of an initial set of test cases, including gathering all relevant data;
• creation of a analysis technique for both model-model and model-observation comparisons, including identification of variables, statistics, and graphics;
• creation of a data warehouse website that can share the test case data and analyses with the larger audience; and
  
• review, comment, and revision of the above based on JFSP and community feedback.

What models and output are part of SEMIP?

When doing this kind of analysis, it is important to distinguish between specific models, and a generic class of models that perform a modeling step.  SEMIP is designed to cross-compare various models that all fulfill the basic functions of a modeling step.  While each specific model will have its own idiosyncratic outputs, SEMIP performs comparisons on a number of output levels that all or nearly all of the models can produce. 

The figure to the right lists the labels of the modeling steps and output levels as used in SEMIP.  Note that a modeling step can produce more than one kind of output level (specifically dispersion models can output both total column smoke and ground concentrations).  

For more discussion of models, modelings steps, and output levels and variables see Models, Modeling Steps, and Output Levels.

What is Phase 1?

Phase 1 information: