Historical deforestation drives strong rainfall decline across the southern Amazon basin.

ABSTRACT: The Amazon forest has recently experienced substantial human-induced loss of forest cover. However, the extent to which such historical deforestation has altered regional observed precipitation through inter-regional atmospheric moisture transport remains unclear. Here, we combine satellite observations and an atmospheric moisture tracking model to quantify these feedbacks over the past four decades (1980-2019). We identify a contrasting northern increase and southern decrease dipole trend in observed precipitation across the Amazon basin. The pronounced reduction in precipitation for the southern Amazon basin reaches up to 3.9-5.4 mm yr^-1 per year, resulting in an 8-11% decline in annual precipitation across the observation period. We discover that this reduction in precipitati

SUBMITTER: Cui J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12905307 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature