It has consequences, if (agricultural or forest) soils can hold less and less water and dry out. Although this research is on global drylands, I dare to guess that the same pattern applies to our desiccating agricultural landscapes. Reduced evaporation due to dry soils can affect the land surface energy balance, with implications for local and downwind precipitation. […] We show that dryland droughts are particularly prone to self-propagating because evaporation tends to respond strongly
This is fascinating research, showing the interrelation of dry soils and heat-waves. We find that, in both events, persistent atmospheric pressure patterns induced land–atmosphere feedbacks that led to extreme temperatures. During daytime, heat was supplied by large-scale horizontal advection, warming of an increasingly desiccated land surface and enhanced entrainment of warm air into the atmospheric boundary layer. Overnight, the heat generated during the day was preserved in an anomalous kilometres-deep atmospheric layer located several hundred
Interesting article: We found that the effect of column water vapor on hourly precipitation was strongly nonlinear, showing a steep increase in precipitation above a column water vapor content of around 60 mm. […] Although loss of tree transpiration from the Amazon causes a 13% drop in column water vapor, we found that it could result in a 55%–70% decrease in precipitation annually. Consequences of this nonlinearity might be twofold: although the effects of deforestation may
I argued in my UNEP article “” about this… and more and more science seems to prove it: Forests cool the earth! Researchers from the US and Colombia found that overall forests keep the planet at least half of a degree Celsius cooler when biophysical effects – from chemical compounds to turbulence and the reflection of light – are combined with carbon dioxide. “Despite the mounting evidence that forests deliver myriad climate benefits, trees are
