Speaker: Gabrielle “Bee” Leung, Anna Julia Cooper Fellow, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, UW-Madison
Human activities drive extensive deforestation across much of the tropics. On top of the numerous ecological and societal impacts, this forest loss also has the potential to fundamentally reshape the atmospheric processes that govern cloud formation and rainfall by altering exchanges of moisture, heat, and momentum between the surface and the atmosphere. Such hydrological shifts have important implications for the terrestrial water cycle, and thus on climate and ecosystems. However, the atmospheric response to land cover changes remains a substantial source of uncertainty in our understanding of the Earth system, in large part due to the complex, multi-scale interactions between the land and atmosphere.
In this talk, Leung will explore ways to bridge these scales to better understand how land surface modifications propagate through the atmosphere and ultimately impact clouds and rainfall. She will focus on Southeast Asia, a region characterized by both complex meteorology and extensive conversion of pristine tropical rainforest to palm oil and rubber plantations. Leung will cover long-term satellite estimates that quantify how clouds respond to tropical deforestation across a range of meteorological conditions. Then she will discuss how high-resolution cloud modeling and Lagrangian object-tracking allow us to follow the lifecycle of individual convective cells and their responses to forest loss in complex heterogeneous landscapes.
By integrating these satellite and modeling perspectives, we can develop a fuller picture of not only how land-surface changes impact the atmosphere, but also where and when these perturbations have the potential for the greatest impacts on the broader Earth system