Proof of the Post-drought Effect of Amazonian Forests from Space

In 2005, the tropical forests in Amazonia went through a severe drought event across the entire basin. There have been conflict reports on the drought impact on vegetation and the issue was never settled due to limited ground truth. Remote sensing data have been used but often questioned for signal saturation, data quality, or atmosphere contamination. The quantification of carbon changes in this vast terrestrial carbon pool, especially the post-drought effect, is difficult but essential. Lidar measurements, which are regarded as the accurate retrieval of canopy vertical structure, give us the opportunity to quantify the carbon changes for this severe event. Here, we use the lidar waveforms measured from the GLAS sensor from 2004 to 2007 to calculate the vertical profiles of Amazonian forests and their associated carbon stock. After careful quality-filtering, removal of seasonal effect, as well as uncertainty reduction through spatial averaging and random sampling, we find that the mean canopy height in Amazon has much higher reduction from 2006 to 2007 compared to either the drought year from 2004 to 2005, or the immediate post-drought change from 2005 to 2006, demonstrating a lagged effect of drought. Our estimation of carbon loss from model calculation also show that 2005 drought had an significant impact on the carbon exchange, and emissions from post drought disturbance may match the emissions of annual deforestation from Amazonia.