The goal is to understand how burning biomass in South America is affecting the local weather and air quality, and to close crucial gaps in climate models about how the process changes Earth’s radiation balance.
More importantly, aerosols may actually produce cooling at the surface as well as warming at mid altitudes, says Karla Longo, a senior scientist at INPE and one of the 40 SAMBBA field researchers. Current models cannot account for such complex interactions, and therefore can’t accurately predict how increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and burning biomass will affect the radiation balance of the world’s largest tropical forest. “The very direction of the error signal in our models, whether it is towards warming or cooling, is hard to predict,” says Longo.
Ben Johnson, a member of the team from the Met Office, says that information on those aerosols is also important for improving global weather forecasts. “This is the first time we have measured biomass burning emissions from tropical forest with such comprehensive instrumentation.”
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on September 24, 2012.
