There won’t be many places in the world that have escaped the recent impacts of unusual droughts, floods and unseasonal temperatures. These are often ascribed to the role of greenhouse gases, leading to climate change. But there are additional causes. An international research team has found an additional threat: the impacts of changes in vegetation cover, especially forest loss.
There won’t be many places in the world that have escaped the recent impacts of unusual droughts, floods and unseasonal temperatures. These are often ascribed to the role of greenhouse gases, leading to climate change. But there are additional causes. An international research team has found an additional threat: the impacts of changes in vegetation cover, especially forest loss.
For many parts of the world rainfall depends on what happens to land and water in distant countries. For example, a molecule of moisture that enters Europe from the Atlantic Ocean, may fall as snow or rain and be reevaporated to the atmosphere several times, before it reaches a rainfed field in Central Asia or China.
A new study, recently published in Heliyon, aimed to identify the vulnerability of the atmospheric circulation processes—the drivers of „winds“—that maintain inland rainfall. Temperature and humidity are key and both heavily influenced by a region’s vegetation cover.
