Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands
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 tropica...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Wiley
2023
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148035 |
| _version_ | 1826203878507413504 |
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| author | Feldman, Andrew F Short Gianotti, Daniel J Dong, Jianzhi Trigo, Isabel F Salvucci, Guido D Entekhabi, Dara |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Feldman, Andrew F Short Gianotti, Daniel J Dong, Jianzhi Trigo, Isabel F Salvucci, Guido D Entekhabi, Dara |
| author_sort | Feldman, Andrew F |
| collection | MIT |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T12:44:47Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/148035 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T12:44:47Z |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| publisher | Wiley |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1480352023-02-15T03:25:29Z Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands Feldman, Andrew F Short Gianotti, Daniel J Dong, Jianzhi Trigo, Isabel F Salvucci, Guido D Entekhabi, Dara Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering 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. 2023-02-14T14:46:23Z 2023-02-14T14:46:23Z 2022 2023-02-14T14:43:11Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148035 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). en 10.1111/GCB.16455 Global Change Biology Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/pdf Wiley Wiley |
| spellingShingle | Feldman, Andrew F Short Gianotti, Daniel J Dong, Jianzhi Trigo, Isabel F Salvucci, Guido D Entekhabi, Dara Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands |
| title | Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands |
| title_full | Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands |
| title_fullStr | Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands |
| title_full_unstemmed | Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands |
| title_short | Tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands |
| title_sort | tropical surface temperature response to vegetation cover changes and the role of drylands |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148035 |
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