Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

Climatologically, between 20 and 40% of the precipitation that falls over the Amazon basin comes from transpiration from the dense canopy and evaporation from soils within the forest itself. However, estimating the local terrestrial contribution of moisture at an intra-daily timescale is not easily done with existing methods. New water vapor tracers embedded within the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) atmospheric model allow us to "tag" the moisture that originates from the Amazonian basin and track it in space and time as it moves through the atmosphere and eventually rains out of the atmospheric column. This tool allows us to analyze detailed processes that occur at much smaller spatial and temporal scales than previously studied.