Remote regional impacts of tropical deforestation on precipitation.
To introduce my upcoming blog post, I wanted to give a little snippet in advance: this highly informative map, summarising the remote regional climate impacts of tropical deforestation. Here we look at changes induced to precipitation patterns.
Map shows: Projected increases (circles) and decreases (triangles) in rainfall in full-deforestation scenario of the Amazon (red), southeast Asia (blue) or central Africa (yellow). Source: Lawrence and Vandecar (2015)
It gives us a first indication of how far-reaching the effects of complete tropical deforestation will be. Amazonian deforestation will likely decrease precipitation in much of the U.S.'s Mid-West, the Caribbean and parts of South-East Asia. Increases are expected over northern Europe, eastern North America and East-Africa. What I found interesting in evaluating the predicted cumulative impact of tropical deforestation is that there will be little net change to global mean precipitation.
Hi Loulou,
ReplyDeleteA very interesting blog post regarding deforestation and precipitation events. I was wondering do you believe that although tropical deforestation will cumulatively effect global mean precipitation by a little, changes in precipitation patterns regionally would have major implications on then environment globally as they are all interconnected? What do you think?
Dear Maria, thanks for the insightful question. I have written a newer post that focuses on the 'teleconnections' that are responsible for creating a remote impact, in regions far off the actual deforested area.
ReplyDeleteIf I understand your question correctly, you are asking whether there are further environmental consequences that arise from the increase or decrease in rainfall in remote locations (e.g. those highlighted in the map above) linked to deforestation in the Amazon. While the exact impact is, again, dependent on the complex atmospheric-oceanic-biosphere linkages of a particular location - my answer is clearly yes. I've become more and more aware how interlinked the Earth system is and thus, a dramatic change in one sphere is likely to somehow affect another.