• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Do Forests Make Wind?

ramonmercado

CyberPunk
Joined
Aug 19, 2003
Messages
58,109
Location
Eblana
An interesting theory, perhaps a mod could find a thread it fits into.

A controversial Russian theory claims forests don’t just make rain—they make wind

Every summer, as the days get long, Anastassia Makarieva leaves her lab in St. Petersburg for a vacation in the vast forests of northern Russia. The nuclear physicist camps on the shores of the White Sea, amid spruce and pine, and kayaks along the region’s wide rivers, taking notes on nature and the weather. “The forests are a big part of my inner life,” she says. In the 25 years she has made her annual pilgrimage north, they have become a big part of her professional life, too.

For more than a decade, Makarieva has championed a theory, developed with Victor Gorshkov, her mentor and colleague at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI), on how Russia’s boreal forests, the largest expanse of trees on Earth, regulate the climate of northern Asia. It is simple physics with far-reaching consequences, describing how water vapor exhaled by trees drives winds: winds that cross the continent, taking moist air from Europe, through Siberia, and on into Mongolia and China; winds that deliver rains that keep the giant rivers of eastern Siberia flowing; winds that water China’s northern plain, the breadbasket of the most populous nation on Earth.

With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world’s great forests are often referred to as the planet’s lungs. But Makarieva and Gorshkov, who died last year, say they are its beating heart, too. “Forests are complex self-sustaining rainmaking systems, and the major driver of atmospheric circulation on Earth,” Makarieva says. They recycle vast amounts of moisture into the air and, in the process, also whip up winds that pump that water around the world. The first part of that idea—forests as rainmakers—originated with other scientists and is increasingly appreciated by water resource managers in a world of rampant deforestation. But the second part, a theory Makarieva calls the biotic pump, is far more controversial.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...s-forests-don-t-just-make-rain-they-make-wind
 
It has long been known that the wind is caused by air moving from high pressure to low pressure areas. Air pressure is related to temperature and humidity (and other variables) and air temperature is closely linked to whether the surface of the Earth at that point is pale (reflects heat) or dark (absorbs heat). Soaring birds such as buzzards and eagles, and humans adventurers such as glider pilots, balloonists and even sailors need this basic understanding of how the wind works.

So it is no surprise that an area of forest will have an influence on the temperature and humidity of the air above it, and therefore the force and direction of winds for some considerable distance.

Weather is chaotic, in that whilst it is all "cause and effect", it is impossible to make precise predictions because even a small change in initial conditions may result in a large change elsewhere. Whether a forest is left standing, or is felled, will inevitably affect the climate, although the exact effect may not be predictable.

This article strikes me as someone putting forward a perfectly reasonable argument for preserving forests, rather than presenting an exciting and hitherto unsuspected discovery.
 
Back
Top