Abstract
Replacing natural vegetation with realistic tropical crops over the Amazon region in a global Earth system model impacts vertical transport of heat and moisture, modifying the interaction between the atmospheric boundary layer and the free atmosphere. Vertical velocity is decreased over a majority of the Amazon region, shifting the ascending branch and modifying the seasonality of the Hadley circulation over the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans. Using a simple model that relates circulation changes to heating anomalies and generalizing the upper-atmosphere temperature response to deforestation, agreement is found between the response in the fully-coupled model and the simple solution. These changes to the large-scale dynamics significantly impact precipitation in several remote regions, namely sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico, the southwestern United States and extratropical South America, suggesting non-local climate repercussions for large-scale land use changes in the tropics are possible.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by joint funding from the National Science Foundation (ATM-0830068), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NA09OAR4310058), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NNX09AN50G) of the Center for Ocean Land Atmosphere Studies (COLA). We would also like to acknowledge high-performance computing support from Yellowstone (ark:/85065/d7wd3xhc) provided by NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
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Badger, A.M., Dirmeyer, P.A. Remote tropical and sub-tropical responses to Amazon deforestation. Clim Dyn 46, 3057–3066 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2752-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2752-5