Geophys. Res. Lett. 38, L19802 (2011)
Replacing forest with pasture or cropland often produces sharp gradients in the landscape, which tend to generate local temperature-induced circulation patterns called 'vegetation breezes' — analogous to sea breezes. These breezes enhance rainfall-generating convection currents.
Luis Garcia-Carreras and Douglas Parker from the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science at the University of Leeds, UK, used an ensemble of atmospheric cloud-resolving model simulations to investigate the potential impact of deforestation-generated vegetation breezes on local rainfall.
The results indicate that variation in vegetation cover increases the total locally generated rainfall on average by 13% and produces a particularly pronounced four- to sixfold increase in rainfall over cropland boundaries compared with uniform land cover. However, rainfall was not enhanced everywhere, and was actually reduced by 50% or more over the forest. The authors note that these local- to medium-scale processes can interact with large-scale atmospheric circulation in complex ways, so predicting the change in total precipitation due to deforestation is an ongoing research aim.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brown, A. Deforestation changes rainfall. Nature Clim Change 1, 393 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1277
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1277