Forests as rainmakers - a controversial hypothesisFriday 22 Mar 2013
It suggests, for instance, that by strategically replanting forests we could attract rainfall into desert and arid regions like the African Sahel, where drought has for year’s ravaged crops and induced famine. Likewise, significant forest loss could transform lush tropical regions into arid landscapes. “Traditionally people have said areas like the Congo and the Amazon have high rainfall because they are located in parts of the world that experience high precipitation,” he said. “But we are proposing the opposite: that the forests cause the rainfall and if they weren’t there the interior of these continental areas would be deserts.” Scientists Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov first published a paper in 2006 outlining the model that forests, by creating low atmospheric pressure, move moist air inland and help generate rainfall. Sheil and his co-author Daniel Murdiyarso reviewed the importance of the concept in a 2009 article [2] for the Bioscience journal. The new paper, in which Makarieva, Gorshkov, Sheil and others collaborate to outline the detailed physics behind the so-called ‘biotic pump’ hypothesis goes further by emphasising the physics behind how evaporation and condensation generate atmospheric pressure differences. For more information, check out this month's R&D Works Newsletter
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