How Does the Amazon Make Its Own Rain?

Hans Segura · portrait · 2:51

Resources

Video ID

hans-segura

Video

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/hans-segura/video.mp4

Poster

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/hans-segura/poster.jpg

Subtitles · English

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/hans-segura/en.vtt

Document

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    "title": "How Does the Amazon Make Its Own Rain?",
    "author": "Hans Segura",
    "description": "Nearly half the rain that falls on the Amazon has already fallen there before. Hans Segura follows a water molecule through evaporation, transport, and towering afternoon storms to show how the forest recycles its own rainfall. This publication explains why that self-watering loop makes the Amazon both resilient and fragile, and what deforestation does to the engine that keeps it wet.",
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            "start": 7.24,
            "text": "Hello, my name is Hans Segura. I come from Peru where I did my bachelor's studies in agricultural engineering, but then I realized that I really like to learn about precipitation and that made me go to France and then the Max Planck Institute to learn about tropical precipitation."
          },
          {
            "start": 24.46,
            "text": "I earned my PhD in France and now I am working as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology."
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            "start": 37.76,
            "text": "So as a postdoc, I started to analyze this new generation of Earth system models."
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          {
            "start": 44.32,
            "text": "These can resolve convection in the atmosphere, atmospheric convection, and also mesoscale eddies in the ocean."
          },
          {
            "start": 53.57,
            "text": "And that was very interesting for my part because it's a new type of framework for how to model climate."
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          {
            "start": 57.9,
            "text": "And my role in nextGEMS is to collaborate with them, and in particular regarding tropical precipitation and how these two things, better representation of the ocean mesoscale eddies and the atmospheric convection, deep convection, can give us better characteristics of the different features of tropical precipitation, no matter if it's over land or ocean."
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            "start": 90.4,
            "text": "So as a result of all the work that I'm doing in collaboration with the people in nextGEMS, we found two important things."
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            "start": 94.98,
            "text": "When we start to have these kilometer-scale scale Earth system models, precipitation in the tropics over the land seems to be well represented and particularly robust."
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            "start": 106.08,
            "text": "That means that no matter the configuration that we are getting, we change the parameters in the model, the structure of the tropical rain belt, which is this rain belt that encircles the tropics tropics over the land, is quite similar and doesn't change too much."
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            "start": 126.3,
            "text": "The other side is the ocean, where it seems to be very sensitive to the sea surface temperature pattern."
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            "text": "And when we talk about the sea surface temperature pattern, we can talk about how the ocean and the atmosphere interact."
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            "start": 141.12,
            "text": "For example, one can see that low clouds can reflect more solar radiation and as a consequence we can cool the ocean."
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            "start": 146.26,
            "text": "Also, ocean transport of energy from the equator towards the subtropics or towards the mid-latitudes can also play an important role there."
          },
          {
            "start": 158.16,
            "text": "But nevertheless, this is very interesting because there are new things that we need to do, more theory, more work and especially more science and that is fun."
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        "keyTakeaway": "The Amazon recycles a large share of its own rainfall, so clearing forest weakens the rain machine itself.",
        "summary": "Trees pump water back into the sky, where it feeds the next storms downwind: moisture recycling. This loop sustains the wet season and buffers droughts, but it also means forest loss reduces rainfall over the remaining forest, pushing parts of the basin toward a drier, more flammable state."
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            "label": "Moisture recycling",
            "description": "Rain that comes from water evaporated within the same region rather than from the ocean.",
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          {
            "label": "Evapotranspiration",
            "description": "The forest's pumping of soil water into the atmosphere through leaves.",
            "start": 35.908
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          {
            "label": "Tipping point",
            "description": "A threshold beyond which reduced rainfall and forest loss reinforce each other.",
            "start": 87.408
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            "title": "Tropical convection",
            "description": "The towering storm systems that dominate rainfall in the deep tropics."
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            "title": "Biosphere-atmosphere coupling",
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            "title": "Moisture recycling and the resilience of Amazonian rainfall",
            "authors": ["Hans Segura"],
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            "abstract": "Storm-resolving simulations and moisture tracking quantify rainfall recycling across the Amazon and its sensitivity to forest loss.",
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            "poster": "https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/isabel-gelfert/poster.jpg",
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