UM project lauded for planet-wide look
at climate change
Posted at 12:20 p.m. June
5
By Betsy Cohen -
Missoulian
|
 |
|
Earth is becoming a greener and wetter
place to live according to NASA-funded researchers at the University
of Montana who have followed global climate changes for the past two
decades.
This week, the work of UM-based scientists
Ramakrishna Nemani and Steve Running will be highlighted in the
current edition of Science magazine, the world's premiere science
journal.
The scientists' work is part of a research
collaboration with scientists at the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography and the University of California-San Diego, Boston
University and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Maryland.
"We have been working in this field almost 20 years
and this study brings together everything we have done in that time
- it really is a summary of our work," said Nemani, lead researcher
of the project.
What makes their findings so exciting is that
for the first time scientists have a global picture of what is
happening to climate and vegetation, he said.
Although
scientists have known from a number of small scale studies over the
last few years that the places are getting greener and that the
forests have been growing better, until now, there hasn't been a
planet-wide look at climate changes.
Nemani said he is not so
startled by the findings, but pleasantly surprised that the land of
his birth is faring well.
"I come from India, it was nice to
see the subcontinent has done quite well in the last two decades,"
he said. "I wasn't expecting that."
The information the
scientists have used in their article, entitled "Climate-Driven
Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to
1999," is drawn from data collected by satellites and from
world-wide local weather records, Running said.
They
determined how factors such as rising temperatures, altered
precipitation patterns and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide have
affected plant growth.
They concluded that vegetation growth
increased 6 percent over extensive regions of Earth, with the
largest increase in tropical ecosystems. Amazon rainforests
accounted for 42 percent of the global increase, due mostly to
decreased cloud cover and the resulting increase in solar
radiation.
For Running, the findings are welcomed news, he
believes, the larger non-scientific world will
appreciate.
"Most of the press you read about global warming
is bad news, and I think the public has gotten accustomed to
whenever the issue comes up they think gloom and doom," Running
said. "I think this will help lift people's
spirits.
"Everyone will agree that improved vegetation means
more resources for humanity to work with."
On Friday, NASA
announced the news with a splashy press conference, complete with
video imagery and graphics to illustrate the scientists
findings.
Running said he was surprised by the fanfare, but
welcomes the attention. His lab, he said, has been hammering away at
climate studies for a long time, and now their work is paying off
with information that people around the globe will find
useful.
"This is a fairly major step forward in how we
understand Earth's system and how climate interacts with Earthís
biosphere," he said. "The better we understand these changes, the
better we can react and work with them.
"Locally, it may help
us make decisions on things like how to expand agriculture in
Montana," he said. "I have been watching wine regions expand in
different parts of the world - there's an active winery in British
Columbia, and 20 years ago they didn't, wouldn't, have
one.
"I think this research gives us a better understanding
of where we should be reconsidering certain aspects of land
management."
