Pantropical forest hydrology

Abstract:

First, we show pantropical distributions of annual amount and seasonality of precipitation with world tropical forest map, derived from the global-scale gridded data. Then, using the atmospheric water balance method with the global-scale data, we built pantropical maps of evapotranspiration (ET), runoff (Q) and rainfall recycle (from precipitation) ratio (RR). Comparisons of the pantropical gridded-computations of ET, Q and RR with those from pantropical fields (mostly, experimental forest watersheds) data revealed differences in hydrologic component characteristics between temperate and tropical forests and how such tropical hydrologic components are generated. Furthermore, an application of Budyko’s Radiation Dryness Index to our pantropical analyses allowed us to consider the limits of world tropical forests and future distribution of tropical forests under climate change conditions.