Long-term impact of Amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate
Amazon discharges a large volume of freshwater into the ocean, yet its impact on climate is largely unknown. Climate projections show that a warmer northern tropical Atlantic Ocean together with a warmer equatorial Pacific lead to extreme droughts in the Amazonia, considerably reducing the Amazon ru...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:5591215 2023-05-15T15:06:44+02:00 Long-term impact of Amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate Jahfer, S. Vinayachandran, P. N. Nanjundiah, Ravi S. 2017-09-08 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5591215/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28887467 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10750-y en eng Nature Publishing Group UK http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5591215/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28887467 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10750-y © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. CC-BY Article Text 2017 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10750-y 2017-09-17T01:24:08Z Amazon discharges a large volume of freshwater into the ocean, yet its impact on climate is largely unknown. Climate projections show that a warmer northern tropical Atlantic Ocean together with a warmer equatorial Pacific lead to extreme droughts in the Amazonia, considerably reducing the Amazon runoff. Here we present results from coupled model simulations and observations on the climatic response to a significant reduction in Amazon runoff into the Atlantic Ocean. Climate model simulation without Amazon runoff resulted in cooler equatorial Atlantic, weakening the Hadley cell and thereby the atmospheric meridional cells. Consequently, the extratropical westerlies turned weaker, leading to prevalent negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) like climate, similar to the observed anomalies during Amazon drought years. This study reaffirms that spatial signature of NAO is in part driven by sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the tropical Atlantic. Winters of northern Europe and eastern Canada turned cooler and drier whereas southern Europe and the eastern United States experienced warmer and wetter winters without Amazon runoff. Significant warming over the Arctic reduced the local sea-ice extent and enhanced the high latitude river runoff. More importantly, our simulations caution against extreme exploitation of rivers for its far-reaching consequences on climate. Text Arctic North Atlantic North Atlantic oscillation Sea ice PubMed Central (PMC) Arctic Canada Pacific Scientific Reports 7 1 |
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Article Jahfer, S. Vinayachandran, P. N. Nanjundiah, Ravi S. Long-term impact of Amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate |
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Amazon discharges a large volume of freshwater into the ocean, yet its impact on climate is largely unknown. Climate projections show that a warmer northern tropical Atlantic Ocean together with a warmer equatorial Pacific lead to extreme droughts in the Amazonia, considerably reducing the Amazon runoff. Here we present results from coupled model simulations and observations on the climatic response to a significant reduction in Amazon runoff into the Atlantic Ocean. Climate model simulation without Amazon runoff resulted in cooler equatorial Atlantic, weakening the Hadley cell and thereby the atmospheric meridional cells. Consequently, the extratropical westerlies turned weaker, leading to prevalent negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) like climate, similar to the observed anomalies during Amazon drought years. This study reaffirms that spatial signature of NAO is in part driven by sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the tropical Atlantic. Winters of northern Europe and eastern Canada turned cooler and drier whereas southern Europe and the eastern United States experienced warmer and wetter winters without Amazon runoff. Significant warming over the Arctic reduced the local sea-ice extent and enhanced the high latitude river runoff. More importantly, our simulations caution against extreme exploitation of rivers for its far-reaching consequences on climate. |
format |
Text |
author |
Jahfer, S. Vinayachandran, P. N. Nanjundiah, Ravi S. |
author_facet |
Jahfer, S. Vinayachandran, P. N. Nanjundiah, Ravi S. |
author_sort |
Jahfer, S. |
title |
Long-term impact of Amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate |
title_short |
Long-term impact of Amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate |
title_full |
Long-term impact of Amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate |
title_fullStr |
Long-term impact of Amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate |
title_full_unstemmed |
Long-term impact of Amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate |
title_sort |
long-term impact of amazon river runoff on northern hemispheric climate |
publisher |
Nature Publishing Group UK |
publishDate |
2017 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5591215/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28887467 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10750-y |
geographic |
Arctic Canada Pacific |
geographic_facet |
Arctic Canada Pacific |
genre |
Arctic North Atlantic North Atlantic oscillation Sea ice |
genre_facet |
Arctic North Atlantic North Atlantic oscillation Sea ice |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5591215/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28887467 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10750-y |
op_rights |
© The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
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CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10750-y |
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