The atmospheric sulfur cycle over the Amazon Basin: 2. Wet season

The atmospheric sulfur cycle over the Amazon Basin: 2. Wet season

Rainforest-initiated wet season onset over the southern Amazon.

Although it is well established that transpiration contributes much of the water for rainfall over Amazonia, it remains unclear whether transpiration helps to drive or merely responds to the seasonal cycle of rainfall. Here, we use multiple independent satellite datasets to show that rainforest transpiration enables an increase of shallow convection that moistens and destabilizes the atmosphere...

What controls the interannual variation of the wet season onsets over the Amazon?

Previous studies have established that sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic are the main forcing of the interannual variation of the wet season onsets in the Amazon. However, this variation appears to be complex and not uniquely determined by SSTAs. What causes such a complexity and to what extent the interannual variation of the wet season onsets is pr...

Trends in the start of the wet season over Africa

A quarter of a century of daily rainfall data from the Global Telecommunications System are used to define the temporal and spatial variability of the start of the wet season over Africa and surrounding extreme south of Europe and parts of the Middle East. From 1978 to 2002, the start of the wet season arrived later in the year for the majority of the region, as time progressed. In some parts o...

Spectral dependence of aerosol light absorption over the Amazon Basin

L. V. Rizzo, A. L. Correia, P. Artaxo, A. S. Procópio, and M. O. Andreae Institute of Environmental, Chemical and Pharmaceutics Sciences, Department of Earth and Exact Sciences, Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil Institute of Physics, University of São Paulo, Brazil Department of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil Max Planck Ins...