Understanding the relationships between local deforestation and CO2 atmospheric measurements in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Amazon forests play a fundamental role in the global carbon balance as a carbon sink, but temperature elevations and frequents extreme events as droughts and floods could make the forests a source of CO2. Local atmospheric measurements of greenhouse gases are needed to better understand how forest will respond to climate change. The lower-troposphere greenhouse gas (GHG) monitoring program over Brazilian Amazon Basin, has been collecting biweekly GHGs vertical profiles in four sites since 2010. We aim to understand the relationships between local deforestation and CO2 aircraft measurements in the Brazilian Amazon. We calculated annual deforestation (using the Amazon Deforestation Calculation Program - PRODES), land use and cover change data (using the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics - IBGE) and fire data (using the Fire Monitoring System) in each annual influence area at the four flight measurement sites of the Brazilian Amazon from 2010-2017 (and also in the mean influence area of all years by sites). We found that when we see total deforestation, it has a relationship with global CO2 emissions in the Brazilian Amazon biome. Fire has a strong relationship in the drought years, mostly in 2012. Looking at each site, we found specific correlations with deforestation, fire and land use. The biggest challenge was to compare spatial analyzes of land use change and fire with punctual data of airplane GHGs measurements. This study will contribute in our understanding of anthropogenic activities over the Amazon forest in a changing climate.