How Forests Increase Clouds And Cool The Climate – Assessment Using Satellites Reveal

Trees sequence carbon dioxide form the atmosphere, converting it to biomass, a role of forest in helping to mitigate climate change. Forests also help to offer climatic benefits in the form of localized cooling by the increase of cloud cover and rainfall generalization.

This is part of the findings Of ESA’s Climate Change Initiative published in the Nature Communications journal as the team in ESA examined the effect of vegetation cover transition into deciduous and evergreen forests.

In the paper, it was stated that forests aside from moderating the climate by atmospheric carbon sequestering, also create a cooling effect on the environment by increasing low-level clouds.

Using satellite observations, the maiden global assessment showed that afforestation increases low-level cloud cover for two-thirds of the world, having the strongest effect on the evergreen needleleaf forest.

 One of the co-authors of the study, Alessandri Cescatti , while analyzing the impact forests have on climate change said: ”Earth observations are increasingly showing that trees and forests are impacting climate by affecting biophysical surface properties,”

In the  paper, the increase of clouds over the year by as high as 15 percent  in afforested areas in temperate, tropical and arid regions was analyzed but a reduction in cloud cover over forests compared to open land was discovered during the boreal winter and spring in North America, Russia and some parts of Eastern Europe when the regions experience prolonged snow cover. It was stated that the boreal summer has strong and stable increase in cloud fraction by 5 percent.

The leader of the Climate Change Initiative Cloud Project, Martin Stengel, though not directly in team of the present project had opined:

 “Without global cloud and land-cover type observations from satellites this study would not have been possible on a global scale. The authors of this study appreciated the high-spatial resolution of the initiative’s products.”

Co-author, Dr. Cescatti affirming the importance of the project to climate change said: “Studies like this one, based on robust satellite observations, are fundamental to characterize the complexity of the climate system and provide benchmarks for climate model developments.”

According to the team, land-based climate mitigation through afforestation, forest restoration, and avoided deforestation should not be seen only in terms of carbon capture, but  policies should be made to include the wider climate benefits that forests offer, which included increasing cloud cover for localized cooling and generating rainfall, giving forests additional hydrological value.

Reference: “Revealing the widespread potential of forests to increase low level cloud cover” by Gregory Duveiller, Federico Filipponi, Andrej Ceglar, Jędrzej Bojanowski, Ramdane Alkama and Alessandro Cescatti, 15 July 2021, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24551-5