Carlos Mechoso, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, was awarded $722,973 by the U.S. Department of Energy for work that aims to better understand how minute particles in the atmosphere affect the climate of the Amazon.
The award is one of six given to U.S. researchers as part of Green Ocean Amazon 2014, a collaborative effort with two Brazilian research organizations to better understand the climate of the Amazon and of how its is affected by land-atmosphere processes.
Mechoso’s project will focus on improving the process of defining the parameters of cloud and aerosol effects by finding more information about the aerosol influences that drive tropical convection. Improvements in defining these parameters will make it easier to predict the daily cycle of convection in both regional and large scale earth system models.
The Amazon Basin’s water cycle serves as one of the primary heat engines of the Southern Hemisphere, and more data about how it functions in its natural state and in states affected by regional and global human activities is needed to improve the accuracy of climate modeling. Some climate models predict that parts of the Amazon may convert from rain forest to savannah, but the potential regional impacts of that shift cannot be accurately modeled with existing data.
