Abstract
Amazonia has experienced large-scale regional droughts that affect forest productivity and biomass stocks. Space-borne remote sensing provides basin-wide data on impacts of meteorological anomalies, an important complement to relatively limited ground observations across the Amazon’s vast and remote humid tropical forests. Morning overpass QuikScat Ku-band microwave backscatter from the forest canopy was anomalously low during the 2005 drought, relative to the full instrument record of 1999–2009, and low morning backscatter persisted for 2006–2009, after which the instrument failed. The persistent low backscatter has been suggested to be indicative of increased forest vulnerability to future drought. To better ascribe the cause of the low post-drought backscatter, we analyzed multiyear, gridded remote sensing data sets of precipitation, land surface temperature, forest cover and forest cover loss, and microwave backscatter over the 2005 drought region in the southwestern Amazon Basin (4°-12°S, 66°-76°W) and in adjacent 8°x10° regions to the north and east. We found moderate to weak correlations with the spatial distribution of persistent low backscatter for variables related to three groups of forest impacts: the 2005 drought itself, loss of forest cover, and warmer and drier dry seasons in the post-drought vs. the pre-drought years. However, these variables explained only about one quarter of the variability in depressed backscatter across the southwestern drought region. Our findings indicate that drought impact is a complex phenomenon and that better understanding can only come from more extensive ground data and/or analysis of frequent, spatially-comprehensive, high-resolution data or imagery before and after droughts.
Department
Earth Systems Research Center
Publication Date
9-5-2017
Journal Title
PLOS One
Publisher
PLOS
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Frolking S, S Hagen, B Braswell, T Milliman, C Herrick, S Peterson, D Roberts, M Keller, M Palace. 2017. Evaluating multiple causes of persistent low microwave backscatter from Amazon forests after the 2005 drought, PLoS ONE, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183308.
Comments
This is an article published by PLOS in PLOS One in 2017, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183308