Efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change are constantly ramping up. Some of these efforts include conservation efforts of existing forests, for example, which can play a crucial role in the management of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The Amazon Rainforest, for example, has long been seen as a vital resource for combatting climate change. Long considered a “carbon sink,” the vast rainforest was capable of absorbing much of the carbon in the atmosphere. However, due to deforestation and human development, the rainforest is slowly disappearing, turning it from a carbon sink into a carbon producer.
However, the rise in climate change is creating a double-whammy for the Amazon and other tropical rainforests, with an increase in severe storms caused by climate change posing new threats to the trees in these forests. A team of researchers recently published a study highlighting the impact of more severe storms on tropical rainforests, which is published in Nature Communications.
Specifically, the team focused in on how the increase in severe storms could lead to an increase in “windthrow” events, or when trees are uprooted or broken by high winds from storms. Trees that are uprooted decompose and disappear, which only feeds climate change because it could cause the forest to become a carbon producer instead of the sink it used to be. This work offers important insight into the dynamic relationship between atmospheric events and how they impact the planet’s surface.
The team estimated the there will be about 40% more cases of windthrow by 2100, about 50% more regions of the Amazon rainforest are expected to experience these events from severe storms.
To draw a link between instances of windthrow and severe storms, researchers compared maps of different windthrow events with atmospheric data from the time of the windthrows. This revealed that a measurement known as convective available potential energy (CAPE), which measures how much energy is available in the atmosphere to move air up and down, was a good measure for predicting windthrow events.
However, researchers highlighted that the relationship between atmospheric dynamics and forests on the surface is a complicated one, and more research is needed.
Sources: Eurekalert!; Nature Communications