A new approach to understanding climate change is happening in the Amazon Basin. The Amazonian Tall Tower Observatory project plans on building a 320 meter high tower and several smaller towers that will measure how much Green house gases affect the Amazon.
The budget for this project is $10.9 million; this will provide monies for several towers to keep records of the chemistry and interactions made between the soil, forest and sky. The construction team has already installed a tower that records the local weather in the Amazon. There were some issues when they cut down too many trees that interfered with the data collection. The main tower will measure C02, methane and other gases; the smaller towers will track local air currents. This data will be programmed into a computer model that will illustrate where the gases come from and how the basin influences them.
Scientists never used a structure this tall before; they only had smaller ones which measured how much C02 was sucked up and released by a patch of trees on a daily basis. Their results on a day where photosynthesis was dominant, had a concentration of 360 parts per million (p.p.m.); at night it was 500-600 p.p.m. As elevation increases, the forest air mixes with the trade winds yielding a concentration of C02 that tends to reach global values of 387 p.p.m. One of the benefits of this new project is that the tallest tower can reach much higher and can cover a larger area than structures in the past. Climate modeler Carlos Norbre in São José dos Campos, Brazil works at the National Institute for Space research. He said to scientists that, “we are going to be able to say significant things about 50% of the Amazon Basin.” The team plans on finishing this project by next year.
The proposed area of coverage can be found here The original article can be found here
