Observed increase in local cooling effect of deforestation at higher latitudes

By Xuhui Lee, Michael L. Goulden, David Y. Hollinger, A. Barr, T. A. Black, Gil Bohrer, R. Bracho, B. Drake, A. Goldstein, L. Gu and 14 more. Nature, 2011

703 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Deforestation in mid- to high latitudes is hypothesized to have the potential to cool the Earth’s surface by altering biophysical processes. In climate models of continental-scale land clearing, the cooling is triggered by increases in surface albedo and is reinforced by a land albedo–sea ice feedback. This feedback is crucial in the model predictions; without it other biophysical processes may overwhelm the albedo effect to generate warming instead. Ongoing land-use activities, such as land management for climate mitigation, are occurring at local scales (hectares) presumably too small to generate the feedback, and it is not known whether the intrinsic biophysical mechanism on its own can change the surface temperature in a consistent manner. Nor has the effect of deforestation on climate been demonstrated over large areas from direct observations. Here we show that surface air temperature is lower in open land than in nearby forested land. The effect is 0.85 ± 0.44 K (mean ± one standard deviation) northwards of 45° N and 0.21 ± 0.53 K southwards. Below 35° N there is weak evidence that deforestation leads to warming. Results are based on comparisons of temperature at forested eddy covariance towers in the USA and Canada and, as a proxy for small areas of cleared land, nearby surface weather stations. Night-time temperature changes unrelated to changes in surface albedo are an important contributor to the overall cooling effect. The observed latitudinal dependence is consistent with theoretical expectation of changes in energy loss from convection and radiation across latitudes in both the daytime and night-time phase of the diurnal cycle, the latter of which remains uncertain in climate models.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af53b323f924bee6c1c39a8d0aa3773e1a3e1295

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

A simplified urban-extent algorithm to characterize surface urban heat islands on a global scale and examine vegetation control on their spatiotemporal variability (2019, background): “deforestation shows a much stronger effect, though the strength and sign of change depend on the latitude (Lee et al., 2011).”
Detection and attribution of vegetation greening trend in China over the last 30 years (2015, background): “, 2013) and can affect the climate system through a number of bio-physical processes (Friedlingstein et al., 2006; Lee et al., 2011; Peng et al., 2014).”
Afforestation in China cools local land surface temperature (2014, background): “In addition, the nighttime warming effect could be magnified as a result of reduced atmospheric turbulence from a more stable stratification over trees (9).”
Magnitude of urban heat islands largely explained by climate and population (2019, background): “1) arise from distinct mechanisms, the relative contributions of which vary with precipitation 2,29 as now discussed using the combined data and model results.”
Site-specific global warming potentials of biogenic CO2 for bioenergy: contributions from carbon fluxes and albedo dynamics (2012, background): “Even if recent studies demonstrate their importance for local climate when bioenergy is produced from crops and plantations expanded on former agricultural land or grassland [20–26], they are often overlooked in most bioenergy LCA, existing climate policies, and methodological standards [10].”