Plant physiological Effect on Amazon Moisture Budget

This project kickstarts activity around land and atmosphere modelling for the flagship UK-Brazil AmazonFACE project. AmazonFACE is a decade-long experiment that will help us to understand how tropical forests respond to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide. Our project will contribute to our understanding of the AmazonFACE site through assessing how shifts in stomatal conductance will influence moisture budgets and regional rainfall patterns. We will develop a back trajectory climatology to identify where future land use change might impact climate at AmazonFACE and identify regions most likely impacted by future changes in plant stomatal conductance. We will synthesise available in-situ and remote sensed data on water, energy and carbon for AmazonFACE evaluation. Finally, we will evaluate the impacts of physiological forcing on the Amazon moisture budget using output from CMIP6 models.

Impact

By analysing data from observations and CMIP6 models, we will provide insights into the potential climate consequences of plant physiological changes and compare to those driven by deforestation. This work will support AmazonFACE evaluation and improve representation of tropical forest-climate interactions in climate models.