Do Clouds Follow Deforestation Over the Amazon?
Frederic J. F. Chagnon, MIT, Cambridge, MA; and R. L. Bras, J. Wang, E. Williams, A. K. Betts, N. O. Renno, L. A. T. Machado, R. Knox, and G. Bisht A Bayesian statistical analysis of ten years of remote sensing observations of cloudiness from geo-stationary satellites (GOES) has produced the strongest evidence of the impact of land cover over the deforested Amazon on the development of convective clouds shown by a number of previous studies. Shallow clouds are prone to appear over deforested surfaces while high clouds occur over forested surface but much less frequently. A understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for the observations was made possible by using simultaneous measurements of atmospheric sounding at a forest and a pasture site during the Rondonian Boundary Layer Experiment (RBLE-3). We demonstrate that the atmospheric boundary layer over the forested area is more unstable characterized by great values of the convective available potential energy (CAPE) than ove
