The effects Amazonian Deforestation on Local and Global Climate

s. General circulation models (GCMs) are typically used to simulate hydrometeorological processes at the seasonal-to-interannual time scales. However, these models are not equipped to simulate the microscale and mesoscale land-atmosphere interactions expected to be very important in Amazonia, where convective clouds and precipitation play a key role. This is because their grid resolution is much lower than the spatial scale of convection, and than the landscape heterogeneity resulting from land use / land cover change in Amazonia. To improve the quality of hydrometeorological scenarios at the seasonal-to-interannual time scales, it is crucial to bridge the gap between these scales. For this purpose, we nested a state-of-the-art regional climate model validated with observations collected as part of the Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere (LBA) Experiment within a state-of-the-art GCM. This two-way interactive coupled model offers the unique capability of simulating explicitly (at a high resolution) convection and precipitation in Amazonia, as well as their effects on the general circulation. An ensemble of multi-year simulations for various scenarios of land use / land cover change was produced. Because this type of coupled model has a time step of integration of the order of minutes, we can study with it the hydrometeorological processes that it simulates at time scales varying from hours to year