Although the influence of rainfall on terrestrial ecosystem has been well established, the influence of ecosystems on rainfall is still debated. Conventional wisdom attributes the onset of rainy season and drought mainly to physical climate variability, while acknowledges that ecosystems can play a secondary role in amplifying or mitigating droughts. However, such a wisdom cannot adequately explain rainy onset, its variability and extreme droughts, especially for the recent decades. This presentation aims to show that tropical ecosystems and their interaction with atmospheric variability can initiate and regulate rainy season onsets and the development of extreme droughts based on a variety of the observational evidences. Such an influence of ecosystems on rainy season onset not only provides underlying mechanisms for landuse influence on rainfall seasonality and drought variability, but also serves as a potential of drought predictability over the tropical continents.
Rong Fu is a climate research and a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the mechanisms that control droughts, rainfall seasonality and variability over Amazonian and North American regions, and how changes of global climate, local vegetation and biomass burning, and oceanic decadal variability have influenced these processes in the recent past and will influence rainfall seasonality and droughts in the future. She has also developed a drought early warning for US Great Plains working with regional water resource managers. Her research is among the earliest to observationally uncover significant roles of tropical rainforests in determining rainfall seasonality over Amazonia and Tibetan Plateau in determining water vapor transport to global stratosphere; She received NSF CAREER and NASA New Investigator Awards, is an elected fellow of the American Meteorological Society. She was the President of the Global Environmental Change Focus Group (2015-2016) and Leadership Team of the American Geophysical Union Council. She has served on many national and international panels, such as the National Research Council special committees on “Abrupt Impact of Climate Change” and “Landscapes on the edge”, and the Climate Working Group for NOAA Science Advisory Board.
This event is supported by the Global Water Initiative at UVA in collaboration with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Darden School of Business, School of Architecture, Center for Global Health, Department of Environmental Sciences, the Rivanna Conservation Alliance and the UVA Office for Sustainability.
Please visit: darden.virginia.edu/global-water-initiative