[1] To quantify the effects of land cover changes in the Amazon on local and global climate, numerical simulation experiments using the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Model II global climate model are conducted. An ensemble approach is adopted, in which a group of six control simulations is compared with a group of six deforested simulations. The deforestation effect in the Amazon is strong, with reductions in precipitation, evapotranspiration, and cloudiness. We also detect a noticeable impact in several other regions of the world, several of which show a reduction in rainy season precipitation that exhibits a high signal-to-noise ratio (determined by the t statistic). To determine the significance of the deforestation signal, we create several ''false'' ensembles, combining control and deforested members randomly, for comparison with the actual ''true'' ensemble. Such an analysis has not been used previously in deforestation studies and is useful for verifying the significance of a purported effect. The globally averaged precipitation deficits for the true ensemble are generally high in comparison with the false ensembles. Furthermore, changes in the Amazon due to the deforestation correlate significantly with remote changes in several areas. This suggests that the Amazon deforestation is producing a detectable signal throughout the Earth, and this finding underscores the importance of human activity in that region.

Past studies have indicated that deforestation of the Amazon basin would result in an important rainfall decrease in that region but that this process had no significant impact on the global temperature or precipitation and had only local implications. Here it is shown that deforestation of tropical regions significantly affects precipitation at mid- and high latitudes through hydrometeorological teleconnections. In particular, it is found that the deforestation of Amazonia and Central Africa severely reduces rainfall in the lower U.S. Midwest during the spring and summer seasons and in the upper U.S. Midwest during the winter and spring, respectively, when water is crucial for agricultural productivity in these regions. Deforestation of Southeast Asia affects China and the Balkan Peninsula most significantly. On the other hand, the elimination of any of these tropical forests considerably enhances summer rainfall in the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The combined effect of deforestation of these three tropical regions causes a significant decrease in winter precipitation in California and seems to generate a cumulative enhancement of precipitation during the summer in the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

State-of-the-art socioeconomic scenarios of land-cover change in the Amazon basin for the years 2030 and 2050 are used together with the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) to simulate the hydrometeorological changes caused by deforestation in that region under diverse climatological conditions that include both El Niño and La Niña events. The basin-averaged rainfall progressively decreases with the increase of deforestation from 2000 to 2030, 2050, and so on, to total deforestation by the end of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of rainfall is significantly affected by both the land-cover type and topography. While the massively deforested region experiences an important decrease of precipitation, the areas at the edge of that region and at elevated regions receive more rainfall. Propagating squall lines over the massively deforested region dissipate before reaching the western part of the basin, causing a significant decrease of rainfall that could result in a catastrophic collapse of the ecosystem in that region. The basin experiences much stronger precipitation changes during El Niño events as deforestation increases. During these periods, deforestation in the western part of the basin induces a very significant decrease of precipitation. During wet years, however, deforestation has a minor overall impact on the basin climatology.

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Two multimodel ensembles (MME) were produced with the GISS Model II (GM II), the GISS Atmosphere Model (AM), and the NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM) to evaluate the effects of tropical deforestation on the global hydroclimate. Each MME used the same 48-yr period but the two were differentiated by their land-cover types. In the “control” case, current vegetation was used, and in the “deforested” case, all tropical rain forests were converted to a mixture of shrubs and grassland. Globally, the control simulations produced with the three GCMs compared well to observations, both in the time mean and in the temporal variability, although various biases exist in the different tropical rain forests. The local precipitation response to deforestation is very strong. The remote effect in the tropics (away from the deforested tropical areas) is strong as well, but the effects at midlatitudes are weaker. In the MME, the impacts tend to be attenuated relative to the individual models. The significance of the geopotential and precipitation responses was evaluated with a bootstrap method, and results varied during the year. Tropical deforestation also produced anomalous fluxes in potential energy that were a direct response to the deforestation. These different analyses confirmed the existence of a teleconnection mechanism due to deforestation.