Regional Hydro-Climatic Changes due to Three Decades of Amazonian Deforestation

Abstract:

A gamut of studies exist which posit that small scale conversion of forests to urban, pasture or cropland can trigger an increase in regional cloudiness and rain. Several of these studies, pertaining to early stages of Amazonian deforestation, attribute this phenomenon to heightened thermal triggering resulting from small-scale (a few kilometers) patchy deforestation. But it is not clear if this phenomenon can be extrapolated to contemporary (tens of kilometers) or future scales of deforestation.

Here, we have carried out the first long-time period study of the effects of changing scales of Amazonian deforestation on regional cloudiness and precipitation using satellite observations made by GOES and TRMM. We have analyzed observations made over the deforested areas in the Brazilian state of Rondonia. We find a shift in the regional hydroclimatic regime over the three decades of deforestation - from spatially uniform cloudiness to dominant cloudiness in the downwind half of the deforested domain. This result is not consistent with a thermal triggering mechanism because thermal triggering would only explain the uniform cloud cover observed during the early stages of deforestation. To further investigate the mechanism, we have also carried out numerical simulations. We found that surface roughness gradients caused by contemporary large scales of deforestation can explain this observed transition. This transition is climatologically important for this region because it affects the observed spatial distribution of precipitation, which has become dominant in the downwind half of the deforested domain in contemporary times. The new mechanism identified here should be accounted for in planning for future land-use change in the Amazon.