How global heat engine drives plant growth

SCIENTISTS AT NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have assembled the first long-term global data set that demonstrates the connection between changing patterns of sea surface temperature and patterns of plant growth across the Earth's landscapes. The results of the study appeared in the Journal of Climate.

Since land vegetation absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, through the process of photosynthesis, and ultimately releases the greenhouse gas back into the atmosphere through decomposition and fires, the authors wanted to gain new insights into where there are large variations in plant growth.Such variations have implications for the spatial distribution of carbon sources and sinks, and how they change over time. Although seasonal variations in plant growth can be large, growth can also vary widely from one year to the next. Moreover, recent studies suggest that due to global warming the growing season is getting longer at higher latitudes, thereby increasing the ability of terrestrial plants to serve as a carbon sink.As part of satellite data processing effort, the team reprocessed nine years of NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data from January 1982 through December 1990 into a series of one- month global composite images of sea surface temperature and plant productivity (indicated by the normalized difference vegetation index, or NDVI). The team notes that AVHRR is a broadband remote sensor designed primarily to look at snow and clouds, not vegetation.Because the sensor did not have strong calibration and orbital requirements, as compared to today's satellite technologies for measuring vegetation, the authors had to painstakingly fine-tune each image to correct for errors that interfere with its interpretation, such as aerosol particles in the atmosphere. The team has processed another nine years of AVHRR data so that they now have a continuous 18-year global data set of sea surface temperature and vegetation measurements.

When viewing the monthly false-colour images consecutively in a time-series animation, distinct large-scale patterns of change become quickly obvious to the eye. Reds representing unusually warm waters wax and wane across patches of ocean while the greens of vigorous plant growth, or the browns of drought, roll across landscapes in response.

Dubbed the "global heat engine," earth scientists have long since recognized that as the ocean releases warmth and moisture into the overlying atmosphere it dramatically influences weather patterns. Anomalously high sea surface temperature, as seen in the equatorial Pacific during El Nino, can drive weather patterns to extremes producing torrential rains and flooding in some parts of the world and severe drought in others.

This new data strengthens scientists' ability to forecast the effects of climate change on vegetation on a global scale. But in order to improve their predictions of what impacts El Nino might have, they need to know what other climate oscillations might affect the strength of El Nino. Natural resources, food lots of things depend upon the healthy growth of vegetation, they conclude. It is important for them to understand and be able to predict how forests and crops will respond to climate cycles like El Nino.

Toward that objective, scientists now have almost 20 years of global observations to give them a perspective they've never had before. With this new data they can begin to examine in more detail the roles of the terrestrial biosphere in both the carbon and water cycles. There are new NASA satellite sensors now in orbit that are much better calibrated than AVHRR and specifically designed to measure the Earth's vegetation.

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