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Effect of land‐atmosphere coupling strength on impacts from Amazonian deforestation
Author(s) -
Lorenz Ruth,
Pitman Andy J.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2014gl061017
Subject(s) - deforestation (computer science) , amazon rainforest , environmental science , coupling strength , atmosphere (unit) , perturbation (astronomy) , coupling (piping) , context (archaeology) , atmospheric sciences , geography , physics , ecology , meteorology , materials science , archaeology , quantum mechanics , computer science , metallurgy , biology , programming language , condensed matter physics
We use a global climate model to explore how increasing the spatial scale of deforestation affects rainfall and temperature over Amazonia. We gradually increase the scale of deforestation separately over a “weakly” and a “strongly” land‐atmosphere coupled region. The rate at which deforestation triggers a response in air temperature increases faster when deforestation is imposed on a strongly coupled region, especially during the dry season. A small deforestation signal in a strongly coupled region can have a larger impact on temperature than a large deforestation signal in a weakly coupled region. Capturing the impact of deforestation, therefore, requires the perturbation to be colocated with the appropriate land‐atmosphere coupling strength. It is unclear from our results whether the impact of deforestation on rainfall depends on coupling strength. Reducing these uncertainties will require larger ensembles of model simulations to be interpreted in the context of coupling strength.