Amazon drought ‘severe’ in 2010, raising warming fears
Baku, February 5 (AZERTAC). Last year`s drought in the Amazon raises concerns about the region`s capacity to continue absorbing carbon dioxide, scientists say.
Researchers report in the journal Science that the 2010 drought was more widespead than in 2005 - the last big one - with more trees probably lost.
The 2005 drought had been termed a "one in a century" event.
In drought years, the Amazon region changes from being a net absorber of carbon dioxide into a net emitter.
The scientists, from the UK and Brazil, suggest this is further evidence of the Amazon`s vulnerability to rising global temperatures.
They also suggest the days of the Amazon forest curbing the impact of rising greenhouse gas emissions may be coming to an end.
The 2010 drought saw the Amazon River at its lowest levels for half a century, with several tributaries completely dry and more than 20 municipalities declaring a state of emergency.
Research leader Simon Lewis, from the University of Leeds, is the scientist who gained an apology from the Sunday Times newspaper last year over the so-called "AmazonGate" affair.
Both droughts were associated with unusually warm seas in the Atlantic Ocean off the Brazilian coast.
Some computer models of climate change - in particular, the one developed at the UK`s Hadley Centre - project more droughts across the region as the planet warms, and a diminishing capacity to absorb CO2.
There are several ways in which warming can turn greenhouse gas-absorbing forests into emitters.
In the Amazon, the principal mechanism is simply that trees die and then rot; in addition, those trees are then not available to absorb CO2 from the air.
For this research, scientists used data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a US/Japanese satellite that monitors rainfall in a belt extending either side of the Equator.
Its observation showed that whereas the 2005 drought covered an area of nearly two million sq km, in 2010 it stretched for three million sq km.
Following the 2005 drought, scientists were able to study the impact on trees and work out the relationship between the rainfall loss and the release of carbon.
In an average year, the basin absorbs about 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.
By contrast, the impact of the 2005 drought, spread over a number of years, was calculated as a release of five billion tonnes.
The new paper calculates the figure for 2010 as about eight billion tonnes, as much as the annual emissions of China and Russia combined; but this, the researchers acknowledge, is a first estimate.
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