Talk To Nature : Articles : Amazon Rainfall Project For August, 2007:

Amazon Rainfall Project for August, 2007:

August is the 11th month of our Amazon Rainfall Project. The Northern Amazon Rainforest is showing excellent rainfall percentages, exceeding in places 200%. This area of largely untouched rainforest north of the main artery of the Amazon River, is referred to as the forest that is inside the ‘shower curtain’, or the ‘shower curtain rainforest’. The forest outside of the shower curtain, or south of the main artery of the Amazon River, which is only partially intact from logging, is drier than the north in the month of August. The southern rainforest is running deficits as low as 50% of average rainfall for the month of August 2007 and even lower. The researcher and the advisors are trying to find more rainfall for this region, but during this month I have been unsuccessful compared to July. I am confident that rainfall amounts will increase and there will be lucky breaks like the rainforest had in July.

As vast tracks of rainforest are cleared by burning and cutting the trees, tons of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that the vegetation has trapped, are released. Those gases collect in the atmosphere, prevent heat from escaping and help to raise the Earth’s temperature. Brazil has become the fourth largest producer of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. “Brazil has a huge amount of forest that is still there. Any changes that happen in the Amazon rainforest have great influence on whether the Earth gets warmer.” According to Phillip Fearnside, a research professor at Brazil’s National Institute for Amazon Research. The 1.5-million-square-mile Brazilian Amazon, larger than India, contains more than 40% of the world’s rainforests, and about a fifth of it has already disappeared, mostly in an “arc of deforestation” along the forest’s southern and eastern edges. The good news is that the rate of deforestation dropped by about 50% from August 2004 to July 2006, according to Sergio Serra, Brazil’s ambassador for global warming.

The bad news is that about 40% of the precipitation comes from moisture evaporated off the rainforest’s tree cover. Cutting back more of the Amazon could mean starving the area of rainfall. Our goal, using Language to Nature, is to maintain average rainfall over the northern largely untouched healthy Amazon forest, as well as being very concerned about rainfall percentages for the southern partially logged rainforest.

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