Modeling Climate Change in the Amazon and in Africa

Dr. Nathan Moore, a research associate in the Department of Geography at Michigan State University, studies climate change on two continents: in the Amazon Basin and in East Africa. Dr. Moore uses the university’s High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) to perform his research.

Dr. Moore says developers in Brazil are clearing forests to construct roads and buildings throughout the Amazon Basin. At the same time, forest is cleared to support agriculture, with grasslands replacing tropical forest. The new grasslands behave like Brazil’s natural grasslands, the cerrado, in terms of retention and evaporation of water.

Whether deforestation occurs for development or farming, deforestation contributes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It also affects local hydrological cycle, which is the focus of Dr. Moore’s research. Grasslands, farms, roads, and buildings retain far less water than the native plants and trees of the rainforest. This leads to diminished rainfall in the region, dramatically changing the rainforest.

Working with principal investigator Dr. Robert Walker and other colleagues, Dr. Moore analyzed 50 worst and 50 best case deforestation scenarios researchers, using actual weather data from 1997 to 2001 as a baseline. They picked 1997 in part because it was an El Nino year, a period in which the waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean are unusually warm.

Modeling changes in climate requires massive amounts of computing power. Dr. Moore used a HPCC computer to run software developed at Colorado State known as RAMS to crunch the data. They modeled the entire Amazon Basin divided into 20-square-kilometer regions. Modeling all 100 scenarios required six months of calculations at the HPCC.

Dr. Moore states categorically that this research would not be possible without the computing capacity of the HPCC. He looks forward to the day when they can model 30 years of data. He and colleagues presented their findings at a conference in Brasilia in October 2006. NASA and the Brazilian environmental agency sponsored the event.

Dr. Moore also participates in the Climate Land Interaction Project (CLIP), studying the effects of changing land use in East Africa upon the climate. CLIP brings together researchers from Social Science, Forestry, Geography, Statistics and Probability, as well as climatologists at other universities.