By Robinson Shaw New research concludes that sea surface temperature as much as land cover impacts rainfall. Precipitation patterns in the Amazon rain forest change when the land is altered by clear-cutting and farming.
Some areas suffer drought while other areas flood.
New research also shows that the sea surface temperature of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans surrounding South America has as much of an influence on rainfall as do changes in land cover, according to Rong Fu, an atmospheric scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The results of his research were presented at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco, California. The new finding will help scientists better predict impending drought or floods. Fu linked rainfall patterns over the Amazon with sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans using a computer climate model. When he plugged El Ni o data into the model, he found that the rainfall pattern in the eastern equatorial Amazon region of Brazil was extremely sensitive to temperature changes on the sea's surface.