Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands
Name
Global Change Biology - 2022 - Feldman - Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.3 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6b15a17efaa22c4f4988cd1ba9b8f8ea
Author(s)
Feldman, Andrew F
Short Gianotti, Daniel J
Dong, Jianzhi
Trigo, Isabel F
Salvucci, Guido D
Entekhabi, Dara
Date Issued
2022
Journal
Global Change Biology
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Feldman, Andrew F, Short Gianotti, Daniel J, Dong, Jianzhi, Trigo, Isabel F, Salvucci, Guido D et al. 2022. "Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands." Global Change Biology, 29 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Vegetation cover creates competing effects on land surface temperature: it typically cools through enhancing energy dissipation and warms via decreasing surface albedo. Global vegetation has been previously found to overall net cool land surfaces with cooling contributions from temperate and tropical vegetation and warming contributions from boreal vegetation. Recent studies suggest that dryland vegetation across the tropics strongly contributes to this global net cooling feedback. However, observation-based vegetation-temperature interaction studies have been limited in the tropics, especially in their widespread drylands. Theoretical considerations also call into question the ability of dryland vegetation to strongly cool the surface under low water availability. Here, we use satellite observations to investigate how tropical vegetation cover influences the surface energy balance. We find that while increased vegetation cover would impart net cooling feedbacks across the tropics, net vegetal cooling effects are subdued in drylands. Using observations, we determine that dryland plants have less ability to cool the surface due to their cooling pathways being reduced by aridity, overall less efficient dissipation of turbulent energy, and their tendency to strongly increase solar radiation absorption. As a result, while proportional greening across the tropics would create an overall biophysical cooling feedback, dryland tropical vegetation reduces the overall tropical surface cooling magnitude by at least 14%, instead of enhancing cooling as suggested by previous global studies.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/GCB.16455
