Amazon Deforestation and Climate Change in a Coupled Model Simulation

Abstract The effects of Amazon deforestation on climate change are investigated using twin numerical experiments of an atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) with prescribed global sea surface temperature and the same AGCM coupled to an ocean GCM (CGCM) over the global tropics. An ensemble approach is adopted, with 10-member ensemble averages of a control simulation compared with perturbed simulations for three scenarios of Amazon deforestation. The latest 20 yr of simulation from each experiment are analyzed. Local surface warming and rainfall reduction are simulated by both models over the Amazon basin. The coupled model presented a rainfall reduction that is nearly 60% larger compared to its control run than those obtained by the AGCM. The results also indicated that both the fraction of the deforested area and the spatial continuity of the vegetated area might be important for modulating global climate variability and change. Additionally, significant remote atmospheric responses to Amazon defor...

[1]  A. Voldoire,et al.  Climate sensitivity to tropical land surface changes with coupled versus prescribed SSTs , 2005 .

[2]  Roni Avissar,et al.  The local and global effects of Amazon deforestation , 2001 .

[3]  Josef M. Oberhuber,et al.  An Atlas Based on the COADS Data Set: the Budgets of Heat Buoyancy and Turbulent Kinetic Energy at t , 1988 .

[4]  M. Suárez,et al.  Ocean Wave Dynamics and the Time Scale of ENSO , 1990 .

[5]  A. Henderson-Sellers,et al.  Possible climatic impacts of land cover transformations, with particular emphasis on tropical deforestation , 1984 .

[6]  R. Pacanowski,et al.  Parameterization of Vertical Mixing in Numerical Models of Tropical Oceans , 1981 .

[7]  S. Xie,et al.  On the origin of equatorial Atlantic biases in coupled general circulation models , 2008 .

[8]  G. Mellor,et al.  Development of a turbulence closure model for geophysical fluid problems , 1982 .

[9]  Piers J. Sellers,et al.  Amazonian Deforestation and Regional Climate Change , 1991 .

[10]  Piers J. Sellers,et al.  A Simplified Biosphere Model for Global Climate Studies , 1991 .

[11]  R. Preisendorfer,et al.  Principal Component Analysis in Meteorology and Oceanography , 1988 .

[12]  S. Levitus.  Climatological Atlas of the World Ocean , 1982 .

[13]  E. Katz.  Seasonal response of the sea surface to the wind in the equatorial Atlantic , 1987 .

[14]  S. Xie.  Oceanic response to the wind forcing associated with the Intertropical Convergence Zone in the northern hemisphere , 1994 .

[15]  P. Malanotte‐Rizzoli,et al.  Interhemispheric water exchange in the Atlantic Ocean , 2003 .

[16]  Robert E. Dickinson,et al.  Climatic impact of Amazon deforestation: a mechanistic model study , 1996 .

[17]  Steve Horstmeyer,et al.  El Niño, La Niña, and the Southern Oscillation , 2011 .

[18]  Paulo Nobre,et al.  Variations of Sea Surface Temperature, Wind Stress, and Rainfall over the Tropical Atlantic and South America. , 1996 .

[19]  V. Ramaswamy,et al.  A study of broadband parameterizations of the solar radiative interactions with water vapor and water drops , 1992 .

[20]  K. Findell,et al.  Weak Simulated Extratropical Responses to Complete Tropical Deforestation , 2006 .

[21]  P. Dirmeyer,et al.  1 Potential Effects of Amazon Deforestation on Tropical Climate , 2006 .

[22]  Renato Ramos da Silva,et al.  Regional Impacts of Future Land-Cover Changes on the Amazon Basin Wet-Season Climate , 2008 .

[23]  Antonio O. Manzi,et al.  Global climatological features in a simulation using the CPTEC-COLA AGCM , 2002 .

[24]  K. Döös,et al.  Calculating Lagrangian Trajectories Using Time-Dependent Velocity Fields , 2001 .

[25]  E. Giarolla,et al.  The Atlantic Equatorial Undercurrent: PIRATA observations and simulations with GFDL Modular Ocean Model at CPTEC , 2005 .

[26]  W. Large,et al.  A Global Ocean Wind Stress Climatology Based on ECMWF Analyses , 1989 .

[27]  J. Hansen,et al.  A parameterization for the absorption of solar radiation in the earth's atmosphere , 1974 .

[28]  K. Miyakoda,et al.  A General Circulation Model for Upper Ocean Simulation , 1988 .

[29]  S. Moorthi,et al.  Relaxed Arakawa-Schubert - A parameterization of moist convection for general circulation models , 1992 .

[30]  Thomas M. Smith,et al.  An Improved In Situ and Satellite SST Analysis for Climate , 2002 .

[31]  Roger Davies,et al.  A fast radiation parameterization for atmospheric circulation models , 1987 .

[32]  R. Molinari,et al.  Subtropical cells in the Atlantic Ocean: An observational summary , 2003 .