The research team uses Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), an AI-based pattern recognition tool, to analyze the behavior of the stratospheric polar vortex. This research has two goals:

 

This work is supported by Woodwell Climate’s Fund for Climate Solutions.

A growing body of research is examining disruptive and abrupt shifts in weather extremes. Contributing to this work, the research team has developed a novel method to identify so-called weather whiplash events.

The team defines a weather whiplash event as a long-lived (4 or more consecutive days), continental-scale pattern in the upper-level circulation of the atmosphere that shifts abruptly (over 1-3 days) to a substantially different pattern, bringing a stark end to persistent weather conditions throughout the region.

This definition eliminates the possibility of misidentifying sharp, localized weather changes caused by features like fronts, discrete disturbances like tropical storms, and changes in low-level winds (e.g., shifting from onshore to offshore or from downslope to upslope).

To identify weather whiplash events, the team is using an AI pattern recognition tool called Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs). Unlike methods used in previous studies, this new approach does not rely on measurements or simulations of precipitation or temperature, so it avoids uncertainties introduced by instrument error, local influences, and deficiencies in models.

This tool allows us to analyze real-world data to identify weather whiplash events in the past. Then, the team applies the same approach to modeled simulations of past weather to see how well those models capture whiplash events, and to future modeled projections to investigate how the frequency of weather whiplash events changes under different emissions scenarios. 

The research team is currently applying this method to three large (120° longitude) sections of the northern hemisphere—the northeast Pacific Ocean/North America, the North Atlantic Ocean/Europe, and Asia.
 

This work is supported by Woodwell Climate’s Fund for Climate Solutions.

Vicious cycles—known as positive feedback loops—are amplifying global warming and causing high northern latitudes to warm four times faster than the globe as a whole. This rapid Arctic warming has decisively altered the speed and shape of the jet stream and with it, the behavior of weather patterns around the Northern Hemisphere.

In previous work, the research team established a link between episodes of Arctic warm anomalies and severe winter weather at locations in eastern North America using observational weather station data. Now, we are expanding this same methodology to examine both historical data and modeled future projections for all northern hemisphere areas, in both winter and summer.

This research will greatly expand our understanding of how amplified Arctic warming is statistically associated with extreme summer and winter weather conditions, and inform ongoing studies exploring these linkages.
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation.

From disruptive winter cold spells to hotter, drier summers, heavier downpours, and more damaging hurricanes—it’s clear climate change is driving extreme weather events, but how?

Weather patterns are becoming increasingly “stuck,” which can lead to extreme events such as prolonged heatwaves, drought, heavy rains, and even winter cold spells. The increasing occurrence of these extremes is just what scientists have expected to occur as humans continue to emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases faster than natural processes can remove them.
Our Work
Led by Dr. Jennifer Francis, this work centers a few key questions whose answers could help us better understand the connections between climate change and global weather, and how to take action:

  1. The Arctic has warmed 3 to 4 times faster than the globe as a whole. The resulting decrease in the temperature difference between the Arctic and temperate latitudes is weakening the west-to-east winds of the jet stream—the fast river of wind encircling the Northern Hemisphere at altitudes where jets fly and that creates and steers weather systems. How will this affect weather patterns, and especially extreme weather events in different places and seasons?
  2. How do natural oscillations (such as El Niño/La Niña) and climate-change-fueled oceanic heat waves affect the jet stream and the Arctic’s influence on weather patterns?
  3. Can the complex computer programs used to simulate the climate system (climate models) capture the Arctic/mid-latitude connections we observe in the real world?
  4. How does rapid Arctic warming affect the Stratospheric Polar Vortex and severe winter weather events?

 

Impact
Understanding how weather patterns are and may be affected by climate change is critical to analyzing climate risk. This research examines the hypothesis that rapid Arctic warming will cause weather regimes to become more persistent, which can lead to extreme events. Dr. Francis and other team members’ previous studies have also documented an increase in “whiplash” events—when one persistent weather regime is suddenly replaced by a different one, such as a drought being replaced by days of rain.

Solaris Education Program

The Solaris education program was created to develop the next generation of climate change scientists, journalists, and decision makers well versed in the challenges of the Tropics. These are the future leaders in tropical forest conservation and landscape resilience.

The Solaris Project provides training and support for individuals from a wide range of backgrounds to develop research expertise and/or policy-relevant skills they need to address the many significant conservation challenges in Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado (savanna) regions. The project immerses Brazilian, US, and other international students in field research at Tanguro Research Station. It also exposes them to public policy through intensive policy development in Brasilia in direct collaboration with relevant governmental agencies. Approximately 200 students have taken part in this program during the last 15 years.

The Solaris program trains four distinct groups through tailored programs: Solaris Scholars, Solaris Fellows, Solaris Field Courses, and Solaris Communicators.

Watch the video below and keep scrolling to hear Solaris participants describing their experiences at Tanguro.

Working at a field site like Tanguro Ranch, with its vast area and variety of landscape types, allows us to pursue research that seeks to better understand all aspects of the landscape, including both human-dominated and natural ecosystems, how they are related, and how they are changing. Ongoing research has been studying watersheds, nutrient cycling, forest resilience, biodiversity, and sustainable agriculture.

Watersheds

Water is key to human society, food security, agriculture, and natural ecosystems. Land use and changes in climate are altering the quantity and quality of available water. Our long-term monitoring of watersheds at Tanguro offers a unique opportunity to understand how these dynamics are reshaping freshwater ecosystems. In an agricultural landscape, watersheds are often heavily modified and impacted. 

Our research studies how deforestation, healthy riparian forest buffers, dams, and reservoirs affect river characteristics.

Nutrient cycling

Intensifying farming in tropical Brazil can increase food production and consequently spare standing forest from being cleared. Increasing crop yields, or growing multiple crops in one year, may require higher use of fertilizers. However, higher fertilizer use will degrade the regional and global environment if it increases leaching of nitrogen and phosphorus to streams and rivers, or if it increases the emissions of nitrous oxide (a powerful greenhouse gas) from farm soils, which occurs in many regions of intensive cropping in temperate regions.

At Tanguro, we examine indicators of nitrogen loss to determine the magnitude and sustainability of current nitrogen losses and how they vary in predictable ways across soils and farming practices. This information can be used to develop recommendations for fertilizer practices that minimize nitrogen losses, reduce environmental impacts, and increase the sustainability of continuous intensive cropping.

Regarding phosphorus, oxisol (highly weathered) soils with high phosphorus absorption capacity are widespread in Brazil. Brazilian soybean producers commonly fertilize with approximately twice as much phosphorus as is harvested in soybean to counter low phosphorus availability within highly weathered soils. This has led to the accumulation of phosphorus in the soil, especially during the 2000s and 2010s, but the degree to which producers can capitalize on this residual soil phosphorus stock to offset fertilizer inputs remains unclear. Using field trials, we are testing the effect of residual soil phosphorus in plots under different management systems.

Resilience

Amazon forests are facing a number of threats simultaneously, including agricultural expansion, fires, logging, climate change, and weak environmental policy enforcement. These disturbances have transformed many tropical forests into fragmented and degraded environments and reduced their natural resilience to disturbances. Degraded forests are prone to climate-induced forest dieback, especially along forest edges that are adjacent to hot, dry agricultural fields. The more extensive the edges, the more prone a forest patch is to degradation and the more carbon is released to the atmosphere.

Fire is not a natural feature in the Amazon landscape. It is almost always a result of human activities related to deforestation or managing pasture lands. Fire is also one of the primary causes of forest degradation in the Amazon. Since 2004, we have conducted a unique experiment on 150 hectares of forest, burning the forests at intervals for 8 years and monitoring it ever since. This is the largest fire experiment in the tropics and its results continue to yield new insights into forests’ resilience and susceptibility to fire, how that interacts with a changing climate, and the pathways of recovery that may occur. 

Our studies also extend to the pantropics and the effects of compound disturbances—when more than one degradation driver operates alongside others—on forest carbon cycling. Recent droughts have temporarily changed tropical forests from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source on timescales varying from at least a few months to a few years. It is still unclear how long drought legacies can persist, and we need a better understanding of the recovery time of drought-disturbed forests. Drought-fire impacts are significantly greater along forest edges, and trees become fuel during droughts, increasing forest flammability. 

Structural and functional changes in tropical forests can lead to declines in carbon stocks and sequestration rates, with major implications for the global climate system. Therefore, quantifying and attributing changes in ecosystem characteristics to different drivers are key to understanding the feedbacks between tropical forests and climate. Improving our understanding of tropical forest responses to future perturbations related to changing climate, drought, and fire frequency and intensity is key. The information can help inform effective mitigation and adaptation strategies that take into account the complex interactions between tropical forests, climate change, droughts, wildfires, and carbon cycling.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity supports ecological resilience. At Tanguro, we study how species diversity informs us of and contributes to ecosystem equilibrium. Our research has shown us that in these disturbed landscapes, plant and animal species diversity may not decrease, but instead shift to novel species and assemblages that are more resilient to repeated disturbance.

We also see that large mammals like tapirs (Tapirus terrestris), which prefer a mosaic landscape, play a key role in forest regeneration, dispersing three times more seeds in degraded forests than in undisturbed forests. Importantly, their large size allows them to disperse large seeds, which grow into large trees that have a higher potential for carbon accumulation. The dung in tapir latrines attracts secondary dispersers like dung beetles and ants, which help spread the seeds to places more suitable for plant recruitment and survivorship. Tapirs also have been shown to change soil nitrification rates via their excreta and by trampling the forest floor, which promotes soil turning and can contribute to forest regeneration by increasing soil nutrient availability.

Sustainable agriculture

Brazil is the largest soybean producer in the world, yet sustaining agricultural production depends on a healthy environment and stable climate. Regional and global climate changes are jeopardizing this huge agricultural system. For the last 10 years, our team of scientists has been studying the vulnerabilities and strengths of the agricultural system in the Amazon Cerrado region, given a rapidly changing climate and shifting market and policy contexts.

Our main findings raise a potentially grave concern for the near future. We show that the area with suitable climate for crop production in Brazil is shrinking and will continue to do so at an accelerating rate. Irrigation, cultivar development, and forest conservation may be the only near-term options for avoiding catastrophic crop and financial losses, given that greenhouse gas emissions will likely continue increasing as a result of inadequate climate policy. We are working together with farmers, stakeholders, and scientists from different backgrounds to evaluate and develop adaptation and mitigation strategies.

We are conserving existing forests on private lands in Brazil’s agricultural frontier by paying farmers to forgo their legal right to cut them down.

Today, the demand for carbon offset mechanisms—a way for private citizens or corporations to pay to counter their greenhouse gas emissions—is growing exponentially. For political and bureaucratic reasons, nearly all of those programs, including REDD+, focus on planting trees, which will take decades to grow and have no guarantee of surviving over the long run. Instead, protecting existing natural forests provides far greater and more immediate environmental returns—preserving the immense amounts of carbon already stored in their trunks as well as all of the social and ecological benefits of complex functioning ecosystems.

Our Work

CONSERV is a partnership between Woodwell Climate and The Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM) [Amazon Environmental Research Institute]. Our plan is simple: pay farmers to forgo their legal right to cut down trees on their land in Mato Grosso province, Brazil. In Mato Grosso alone, there are more than 7 million hectares (17.3 million acres) of primary tropical forest on private lands that could be deforested legally, demonstrating the critical need to take our test program to scale to lock these at-risk lands into conservation contracts and create an asset for farmers to protect, rather than a barrier to their economic growth. 

With the support of more than US$9 million in funding from sovereign wealth funds, we have engaged farmers and tested this idea over the last 5 years in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. We have surveyed farmers’ willingness to take part and leveraged this knowledge to identify, contract, and pay landowners to set aside their remaining forests for conservation. In this initial phase we have contracted with 22 farms in 3 municipalities and are actively protecting 23,000 hectares of forest. We monitor all farms twice annually for compliance. This forest conservation approach has several advantages:

  1. It is low cost. Landowners are willing to accept payments equivalent to the relatively low opportunity costs (~$70-100/ha) of their land.
  2. It is low risk. Accepting payment to keep forests is a financially low-risk activity to the farmer compared to legally deforesting and farming the land.
  3. It is simple. A contract is made between private parties to lease the farmer’s land. There is no government intervention, no bureaucratic processes or third-party funding mechanisms.
  4. It is additional. We target private lands that can legally be converted to agriculture and are increasingly at risk of exploitation.

What we have found is encouraging. We have surveyed many farmers and have shown that even those not taking part in the program are receptive and eager to convert their standing forests into a reliable revenue stream. With sufficient funding from a stable global carbon market, we are confident that this program could be expanded to much of the 7 million ha in the state of Mato Grosso, and beyond to other geographies.

 

Impact

CONSERV offers a concrete, scalable mechanism to promote tropical forest conservation on working landscapes. If successful, it would bypass the political and bureaucratic barriers that have long paralyzed international negotiations to establish markets for forest carbon. By showing what is possible when best practices are employed in one of the world’s most active deforestation frontiers, CONSERV provides a model for larger-scale forest carbon trading in Brazil and could catalyze similar projects throughout the tropics.

 

Visit the project’s website to learn more about CONSERV (Portuguese).