Forest loss in Brazil increases maximum temperatures within 50 km

Forest cover loss in the tropics is well known to cause warming at deforested sites, with maximum temperatures being particularly sensitive. Forest loss causes warming by altering local energy balance and surface roughness, local changes that can propagate across a wide range of spatial scales. Cons...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Environmental research letters 2019-08, Vol.14 (8), p.84047
Main Authors: Cohn, Avery S, Bhattarai, Nishan, Campolo, Jake, Crompton, Octavia, Dralle, David, Duncan, John, Thompson, Sally
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air temperature
biogeophysical climate change
climate change
Datasets
Deforestation
Energy balance
extreme heat
Forests
Halos
Land surface temperature
land use and land cover change
Remote sensing
Surface roughness
Temperature
Tropical environments
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Forest cover loss in the tropics is well known to cause warming at deforested sites, with maximum temperatures being particularly sensitive. Forest loss causes warming by altering local energy balance and surface roughness, local changes that can propagate across a wide range of spatial scales. Consequently, temperature increases result from not only changes in forest cover at a site, but also by the aggregate effects of non-local forest loss. We explored such non-local warming within Brazil's Amazon and Cerrado biomes, the region with the world's single largest amount of forest loss since 2000. Two datasets, one consisting of in-situ air temperature observations and a second, larger dataset consisting of ATs derived from remotely-sensed observations of land surface temperature, were used to quantify changes in maximum temperature due to forest cover loss at varying length-scales. We considered undisturbed forest locations (1 km2 in extent), and forest loss trends in annuli ('halos'), located 1-2 km, 2-4 km, 4-10 km and 10-50 km from these undisturbed sites. Our research finds significant and substantial non-local warming, suggesting that historical estimates of warming due to forest cover loss under-estimate warming or mis-attribute warming to local change, where non-local changes also influence the pattern of temperature warming.
ISSN:1748-9326
1748-9326
DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/ab31fb