Abstract
Abstract. The Amazon Basin plays key roles in the carbon and water cycles, climate change, atmospheric chemistry, and biodiversity. It has already been changed significantly by human activities, and more pervasive change is expected to occur in the coming decades. It is therefore essential to establish long-term measurement sites that provide a baseline record of present-day climatic, biogeochemical, and atmospheric conditions and that will be operated over coming decades to monitor change in the Amazon region, as human perturbations increase in the future. The Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) has been set up in a pristine rain forest region in the central Amazon Basin, about 150 km northeast of the city of Manaus. Two 80 m towers have been operated at the site since 2012, and a 325 m tower is nearing completion in mid-2015. An ecological survey including a biodiversity assessment has been conducted in the forest region surrounding the site. Measurements of micrometeorological and atmospheric chemical variables were initiated in 2012, and their range has continued to broaden over the last few years. The meteorological and micrometeorological measurements include temperature and wind profiles, precipitation, water and energy fluxes, turbulence components, soil temperature profiles and soil heat fluxes, radiation fluxes, and visibility. A tree has been instrumented to measure stem profiles of temperature, light intensity, and water content in cryptogamic covers. The trace gas measurements comprise continuous monitoring of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, and ozone at five to eight different heights, complemented by a variety of additional species measured during intensive campaigns (e.g., VOC, NO, NO2, and OH reactivity). Aerosol optical, microphysical, and chemical measurements are being made above the canopy as well as in the canopy space. They include aerosol light scattering and absorption, fluorescence, number and volume size distributions, chemical composition, cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) concentrations, and hygroscopicity. In this paper, we discuss the scientific context of the ATTO observatory and present an overview of results from ecological, meteorological, and chemical pilot studies at the ATTO site.
Highlights
A little over 30 years ago, Eneas Salati and Peter Vose published a landmark paper entitled Amazon Basin: A System in Equilibrium (Salati and Vose, 1984)
Forest plots of three ha each were inventoried in the igapó, the campinarana, the terra firme on ancient river terraces, and the terra firme on the plateau in order to provide a preliminarily description of the floristic composition and turnover as well as the aboveground wood biomass (AGWB)
We briefly show strong evidence that a simple adjustment factor that depends on the factor z/z∗, as employed by Mölder et al (1999), is not able to collapse the “variance method” dimensionless variables φw(ζ )
Summary
A little over 30 years ago, Eneas Salati and Peter Vose published a landmark paper entitled Amazon Basin: A System in Equilibrium (Salati and Vose, 1984). Deforestation has continued and has only begun to abate in recent years (Lapola et al, 2014; Tollefson, 2015). It goes hand in hand with road construction and urbanization (Fraser, 2014), affecting ecosystems and air quality in many parts of the basin. Whereas Salati and Vose were concerned with climate change as a regional phenomenon driven by deforestation and its impact on the hydrological cycle, the focus now is on the interactions of global climate change with the functioning of the Amazon forest ecosystem (Keller et al, 2009). We will present the key roles the Amazon is playing in the global ecosystem, which form the rationale for setting up a long-term measuring station, including a tall tower, for monitoring its functioning and health
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