New research funded by NASA showed that the Amazon basin and its forests in South America have reduced their amount of greenness due to the "record-breaking" drought in 2010.
"The greenness levels of Amazonian vegetation -- a measure of its health -- decreased dramatically over an area more than three and one-half times the size of Texas and did not recover to normal levels, even after the drought ended in late October 2010," said Liang Xu, the study's lead author from Boston University.
Scientists are worried that this massive drought with low levels of rainfall and climate change the rainforests will turn into woody savannas and grasslands. This could accelerate the process of Global Warming because of all the carbon stored in the rotting wood would be released into the atmosphere. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave notice of possible droughts that could occur with more frequency in the Amazon region in the future.
All the research and studies were done by a group of international scientists that had been working on this for more than 10 years using data from the NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). Maps were created showing the greenness of the area since the 2010 drought and a great decrease in the vegetation was noticed. They also showed that the 2010 drought reduced the vegetation approximately by 965,000 square miles in the Amazon, around four times bigger than the 2005 drought.
"The MODIS vegetation greenness data suggest a more widespread, severe and long-lasting impact to Amazonian vegetation than what can be inferred based solely on rainfall data," said Arindam Samanta, a co-lead author from Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. in Lexington, Mass.
This drought also affected the water levels in some rivers across the basin in August 2010 and reached their record on the lowest water level in October that year. This year 2010 was the driest in comparison to the 109 years that the water level has been measured in the Rio Negro at the Manaus Harbor.
In the summer of 2010, a severe drought began to appear and scientists started researching with the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), which is "a collaborative supercomputing environment that brings together data, models and computing resources". With this, they were able to get satellite pictures of the region and a full image of the impact of the drought. The research was done by January 2011.
"Timely monitoring of our planet's vegetation with satellites is critical, and with NEX it can be done efficiently to deliver near-real time information, as this study demonstrates," said study coauthor Ramakrishna Nemani, a research scientist at Ames. An article about the NEX project appears in this week's issue of Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union."
What interested me about this article was the fact that it is about the environment and how it is being affected by different natural disasters, in this case a drought. The Amazon basin is one of the ecosystems with most biodiversity in the world and it is being destroyed. It is very important that we take care of the environment to preserve it and make it a better place to live, because if we do not take care of it, the consequences could turn against us too. Taking Global Warming as an example, we can see that as the Earth is heating up droughts occur and we must take action to slow it down. There are many other consequences of Global Warming apart from droughts, such as the rising of the sea levels and the thinning of the ozone layer. These causes could be very dangerous, but if we prevent them from happening we can live in peace with nature. We can do so by becoming a more environmentally friendly community by, for example, reducing, reusing, and recycling materials.
It is amazing how we can see what is really happening to the earth more and more and how technology can add in that understanding and communication of data.
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