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Regional dry-season climate changes due to three decades of Amazonian deforestation

Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 200–204 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

More than 20% of the Amazon rainforest has been cleared in the past three decades1, triggering important hydroclimatic changes1,2,3,4,5,6. Small-scale (a few kilometres) deforestation in the 1980s has caused thermally triggered atmospheric circulations7 that increase regional cloudiness8,9,10 and precipitation frequency8. However, these circulations are predicted to diminish as deforestation increases11,12,13. Here we use multi-decadal satellite records14,15 and numerical model simulations to show a regime shift in the regional hydroclimate accompanying increasing deforestation in Rondônia, Brazil. Compared with the 1980s, present-day deforested areas in downwind western Rondônia are found to be wetter than upwind eastern deforested areas during the local dry season. The resultant precipitation change in the two regions is approximately ±25% of the deforested area mean. Meso-resolution simulations robustly reproduce this transition when forced with increasing deforestation alone, showing that large-scale climate variability plays a negligible role16. Furthermore, deforestation-induced surface roughness reduction is found to play an essential role in the present-day dry-season hydroclimate. Our study illustrates the strong scale sensitivity of the climatic response to Amazonian deforestation and suggests that deforestation is sufficiently advanced to have caused a shift from a thermally to a dynamically driven hydroclimatic regime.

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Figure 1: Emergence of the southeast–northwest cloud and precipitation ‘dipoles’ with increasing deforestation in Rondônia.
Figure 2: Time evolution of cloud and precipitation dipole moment vectors showing increasing southeast–northwest redistribution with increasing deforestation.
Figure 3: Emergence of the dipole in simulated data between the 1980s and 2000s and the causal physical mechanism behind the dipole in the present time.
Figure 4: Emergence of the cloud and precipitation ‘dipoles’ over three decades as captured by observed and simulated data.
Figure 5: Transition in the dominant convective regime with increasing scales of deforestation.

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Acknowledgements

D.M. acknowledges support from National Science Foundation Award 1151102. R.W. acknowledges support from National Science Foundation Award 0902197. The simulations presented in this article were performed on computational resources supported by the PICSciE OIT High Performance Computing Center and Visualization Laboratory at Princeton University. We also acknowledge helpful correspondence with K. R. Knapp at NOAA, Asheville, North Carolina.

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Author notes

  1. Jaya Khanna & David Medvigy

    Present address: Present addresses: Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA (J.K.); Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA (D.M.).,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA

    Jaya Khanna, David Medvigy & Stephan Fueglistaler

  2. Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA

    David Medvigy & Stephan Fueglistaler

  3. Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami 33149, USA

    Robert Walko

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Contributions

J.K. and D.M. initiated the project, designed the research and drafted the manuscript. J.K. carried out the research. S.F. contributed ideas to the research design, data analysis and the manuscript. R.W. contributed ideas to the simulation design, simulated data analysis and the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jaya Khanna.

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Khanna, J., Medvigy, D., Fueglistaler, S. et al. Regional dry-season climate changes due to three decades of Amazonian deforestation. Nature Clim Change 7, 200–204 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3226

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