Travel Grant: Workshop on Impacts of Unusual Weather Events and Climate Anomalies on a Tropical Rainforest

Tropical forests around the world play a significant role in the regulation of regional and global climate systems. The Amazon rainforest is the greatest land-based global sink of greenhouse gases and the massive thunderstorm complexes that develop over the region transport moisture and energy that affect global circulation. Due to these factors, it is important to understand how the rainforest is changing in response to warmer conditions and extreme weather events. This travel award provides funding for US scientists to attend a meeting to collaborate with regional scientists on the current state and next steps for research projects aimed at better understanding the impact of climate on the Amazon rainforest and the subsequent global impacts. Included in the meeting will be Indigenous residents of the region who will share their traditional knowledge of observing and anticipating changes in weather and climate. Early career scientists from diverse backgrounds will assume leadership roles in organizing and prioritizing the workshop deliberations. The Amazon rainforest is experiencing unprecedented transformations in response to extreme climate change features such as accelerated warming, prolonged droughts, and biomass burning. The goals of the collaborative US/Brazil workshop are to summarize the state of the science, identify future research topics and methods, and forge partnerships between US and Brazilian scientists. The workshop will be planned around the following session topics: • Summarizing the occurrences of unusual weather events and extreme climate anomalies in the Amazon during the last 50 years and projected climate through 2050. • Examining the extent that climate change and land use shifts have recently contributed to modifying the water cycling in the Amazon Basin. • Discussing future field and numerical modeling studies to develop unified approaches to determine net ecosystem exchange for Amazonian regions with variable topography and for all relevant atmospheric stability conditions. • Identifying the emerging data assimilation methods for in-situ and satellite observations to generate improved analysis fields over the region and identifying the most suitable AI techniques to process large amounts of data related to the condition of the rainforest and its responses to climate-related events. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.