If the Amazon rainforest was completely wiped out it could affect the climate in other parts of the world.
Researchers suggested destruction of the Amazon could lead to a reduction in rain and snowfall in the western U.S. that could lead to more forest fires as well as food and water shortages, a Princeton University news release reported.
Total destruction of the rainforest could cause "20 percent less rain for the coastal Northwest and a 50 percent reduction in the Sierra Nevada snowpack," the researchers predicted. If this happened it would put many California cities and farms in a dangerous state of drought.
The team looked at climate models, and noticed the disappearance of the rainforest would most likely produce dry air over the Amazon which would be lead to a "ripple effect" that would force the air directly over the U.S. between the months of Dec. and Jan.
The researchers compared the effect that would send the air over America to the "warm-water climate pattern El Niño," which California relies on for precipitation in the wintertime. The Amazon pattern could fall victim to the same winds (called Rossby waves) move El Niño.
"Rossby waves are instrumental forces in Earth's weather that move east or west across the planet, often capturing the weather of one region - such as chill Arctic air - and transporting it to another. Because the Amazon pattern forms several thousand miles to the southeast from El Niño, the researchers report, the Rossby waves that put the rainy side of El Niño over southern California would instead subject that region to the dry end of the Amazon pattern," the news release reported.
The researchers said this is only one possible scenario in the event of the rainforest's destruction.
"The big point is that Amazon deforestation will not only affect the Amazon - it will not be contained. It will hit the atmosphere and the atmosphere will carry those responses," First author David Medvigy , an assistant professor of geosciences at Princeton, said.
It just so happens that one of the locations feeling that response will be one we care about most agriculturally," he said. "If you change the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, where most of the irrigation for California's Central Valley comes from, then by this study deforestation of the Amazon could have serious consequences for the food supply of the United States."
