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Droughts can exert a strong influence on the regional energy balance of the Amazon and Cerrado, as can the replacement of native vegetation by croplands. What remains unclear is how these two forcing factors interact and whether land cover changes fundamentally alter the sensitivity of the energy balance components to drought events. To fill this gap, we used remote sensing data to evaluate the impacts of drought on evapotranspiration (ET), land surface temperature (LST), and albedo on cultivated areas, savannas, and forests. Our results (for seasonal drought) indicate that increases in monthly dryness across Mato Grosso state (southern Amazonia and northern Cerrado) drive greater increases in LST and albedo in croplands than in forests. Furthermore, during the 2007 and 2010 droughts, croplands became hotter (0.1–0.8 °C) than savannas (0.3–0.6 °C) and forests (0.2–0.3 °C). However, forest ET was consistently higher than ET in all other land uses. This finding likely indicates that forests can access deeper soil water during droughts. Overall, our findings suggest that forest remnants can play a fundamental role in the mitigation of the negative impacts of extreme drought events, contributing to a higher ET and lower LST.
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This content will become publicly available on September 8, 2026
Cooling outweighs warming across phenological transitions in the Northern Hemisphere
Vegetation phenology, i.e., seasonal biological events such as leaf-out and leaf-fall, regulates local climate through biophysical processes like evapotranspiration (ET) and albedo. However, the net surface temperature impact of these processes—whether ET cooling or albedo-induced warming predominates—and how the dominance changes across phenological transitions and regions remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated the effects of vegetation foliage on daytime land surface temperature (LST) following six phenological transitions, spanning from the start of season to end of season, in deciduous and mixed forests across the mid- to high-latitude Northern Hemisphere during 2013–2021 using multiple satellite products and ground observations. We quantified vegetation effect as the difference between observed LST and LST estimates from the Annual Temperature Cycle (ATC) model, representing a no-foliage scenario. We found that vegetation-induced cooling consistently outweighs warming following all phenological transitions except for the end of the season. Cooling intensity increased with vegetation greenness, ranging from 1.0 ± 0.5 °C (mean ± 0.15 SD) in 59% of forests after the start of the season (SOS) to 6.1 ± 0.8 °C in 89% of forests following the onset of maturity, before declining toward the end of the season. Over half of the regions experiencing cooling showed intensification of surface cooling with climate warming, suggesting an amplified vegetation-mediated cooling under future climate change. The findings provide a more precise understanding of the role of vegetation in modulating climate at the intraseasonal scale, highlighting the importance of integrating phenological impacts into climate adaptation strategies and Earth system modeling.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2224545
- PAR ID:
- 10660258
- Publisher / Repository:
- PNAS
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 122
- Issue:
- 37
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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