Responding to readers: the role of oceanic moisture in watering land, why—if the biotic pump drives winds—they slow over forests, how forests can stabilize rainfall, and ecorestoration vs fires
Thank you for another interesting and insightful article to explain why it is crucial that we stabilize and preserve as much as possible the forests of the world.
Everything is subject to change, some slow some rapid. Preservation and stabilization may never be possible.
I posed years ago working as a National Park Service Resources Management and Law Enforcement Ranger that if we wished to show historical landscapes to a modern public we were dealing with attempting to interfere with forest succession. An example would be at Minuteman National Historical Park I was confronted with 200 years of modifications of eastern mixed hardwood forest back to 1775 farmers fields with stone walls. You might get it if you subsidized modern farmers to work those colonials acreage but you would be doing it with taxpayer money. So the Park Service only still keeps a few areas cleared of major significance. I.of course, hope that DOGE approves of such thrift.
Australia has no similar cloud seed nuclei arriving from elsewhere which likely explains a lot. If a similar link is looked for in that remote portion of the southern hemisphere and is discovered, I could see it perhaps being associated with either Antarctica's dry desert or perhaps South America's Atacama.
Thanks again Anastassia for sharing your knowledge. The importance of Scale (from that research in Brazil) and the importance of starting from the Wet spots and working outwards is especially relevant to my project in southern Africa. A pity your post did not arrive a day earlier, or I would probably have referred to it in my second 6monthly report. Bruce Danckwerts CHOMA, Zambia
This is great. What would be hot spots of destabilization globally? My understanding is that these should be along the coastline where the initial draw of water begins? If these areas are desertifying than the continuity of a forest's draw from the ocean would be disrupted.
Also, I was wondering what is the relevance of the biotic pump for Northern forests?
In Canada we have been spraying our plantations and created some sort of zombie-woodlands... Monoculture, single age tree stands with disrupted microbial life. What would be the capacity of such regrowth to pull water? How would you measure that draw empirically? What would be the global hotspots for wildfire given the biotic pump?
I'm sure that Canada is hit both by the warming of the Arctic, which changes the large water and temperature regimes, and by forest mismanagement. Yet the mainstream narrative is dominated by global warming. Can these two narratives be detangled causally?
Thank You, Anastassia for your thoughtful service to life on our fair planet, and humans, who may become stewards of that life, if we are able to rise to the calling, which is an individual choice, then a sequence of steps along that path. The first steps reveal the next steps...
Great explanation and reinforcement of the idea that to recover an ecosystem that has gone through desertification we have to increase humidity at the beginning and care for the first stage of recovering.
Following this idea, it is vital to make descends the moister of the ocean artificially to the desert coast land.
In a place like Australia or the coast of Chile even CA if we harvest the sea breeze, morning dew, to water the trees and mangroves can help as first line of action.
There is a devise that use electricity to harvest sea moister
This guy put this link in your webinar with Michal Kravcik about Australia. He said it is 40 times more effective than naturally occurring. He was going to try in Atacama for corn crops…. We’ll see.
Dear Anastassia, over the past months I have been reading up on the Biotic pump as well been watching some videos and gradually I think I have gained some understanding. There are a few aspects I am not so sure about and thought here is a good place as any other to ask.
1. Keeping the pump going
Quite often there is the diagram showing moist air created by evaporation over the ocean being blown towards land (say by the prevailing wind, westerlies in the northern hemisphere), where it slightly rises, cools and condenses. In addition, if over forests, evapo-transpiration contributes to more rising moisture, i.e. even more moist air condenses. The result of this condensation is a) precipitation, b) radiation of latent heat into space, and b) a drop in pressure above said forest.
If that drop in pressure occurs at a certain altitude (where the clouds form, about 1-2000 meters?), wouldn't then air been drawn _into_ that area above the forest (at the height condensation occurs) from the surroundings (inland and from the ocean) rather than air flowing off to the ocean as shown in the diagram? The cycle would come to a stop shortly after the condensation occurs?
Perhaps exposing my ignorance here, but why does moist air after evapo-transpiration rise? One would think that moist air is heavier _unless_ energy (evaporation enthalpy) was imparted to the forest (through insolation for instance) in order to evaporate water, then more to decrease density and make moist air rise.
The aforementioned and often produced diagram shows something like a single cell; say, if drawn at scale, perhaps 10-20km wide, half ocean, half land as well as perhaps 1-5km high. This demonstrates to me a biotic pump in operation in a coastal area only. Given that moisture is transported over thousands of kilometres at a certain latitude, what is the mechanism that moves moisture over long distance?
It would not sound plausible to me that a single pump moves air a low altitude using the prevailing winds all the way and the return path also for thousands of kilometres. Rather I could imaging that there are many "pumping cells" , alternating direction perhaps, but with a common group velocity defined by the prevailing winds. Do you have a model for that and a diagram that visualises the long distance transport of moisture.
If there is such a mechanism, i.e. a chain of pumping cells, which sounds quite likely, it then follows that it only needs a deforested area as wide as a cell is big, running perpendicular to the prevailing wind over a sufficiently large distance, the entire moisture transport would be compromised; downstream cells would be deprived of new moisture.
Hello, Peter! Thank you for your thoughtful questions. They require an equally thougtful response. I will see to provide it either here or perhaps writing another post on Biotic Pump Q&A No. 2, combining some other questions that I have so far received. Hope to get this done still in January.
Thank you for another interesting and insightful article to explain why it is crucial that we stabilize and preserve as much as possible the forests of the world.
Everything is subject to change, some slow some rapid. Preservation and stabilization may never be possible.
I posed years ago working as a National Park Service Resources Management and Law Enforcement Ranger that if we wished to show historical landscapes to a modern public we were dealing with attempting to interfere with forest succession. An example would be at Minuteman National Historical Park I was confronted with 200 years of modifications of eastern mixed hardwood forest back to 1775 farmers fields with stone walls. You might get it if you subsidized modern farmers to work those colonials acreage but you would be doing it with taxpayer money. So the Park Service only still keeps a few areas cleared of major significance. I.of course, hope that DOGE approves of such thrift.
Let us also be cognizant of the role of cloud seed nuclei for atmospheric cloud rainfall events.
The Sahara is known to have it's dust travel to the Amazon.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn6106
Australia has no similar cloud seed nuclei arriving from elsewhere which likely explains a lot. If a similar link is looked for in that remote portion of the southern hemisphere and is discovered, I could see it perhaps being associated with either Antarctica's dry desert or perhaps South America's Atacama.
Thanks again Anastassia for sharing your knowledge. The importance of Scale (from that research in Brazil) and the importance of starting from the Wet spots and working outwards is especially relevant to my project in southern Africa. A pity your post did not arrive a day earlier, or I would probably have referred to it in my second 6monthly report. Bruce Danckwerts CHOMA, Zambia
Anastassia,
This is great. What would be hot spots of destabilization globally? My understanding is that these should be along the coastline where the initial draw of water begins? If these areas are desertifying than the continuity of a forest's draw from the ocean would be disrupted.
Also, I was wondering what is the relevance of the biotic pump for Northern forests?
In Canada we have been spraying our plantations and created some sort of zombie-woodlands... Monoculture, single age tree stands with disrupted microbial life. What would be the capacity of such regrowth to pull water? How would you measure that draw empirically? What would be the global hotspots for wildfire given the biotic pump?
I'm sure that Canada is hit both by the warming of the Arctic, which changes the large water and temperature regimes, and by forest mismanagement. Yet the mainstream narrative is dominated by global warming. Can these two narratives be detangled causally?
Thank You, Anastassia for your thoughtful service to life on our fair planet, and humans, who may become stewards of that life, if we are able to rise to the calling, which is an individual choice, then a sequence of steps along that path. The first steps reveal the next steps...
Great explanation and reinforcement of the idea that to recover an ecosystem that has gone through desertification we have to increase humidity at the beginning and care for the first stage of recovering.
Following this idea, it is vital to make descends the moister of the ocean artificially to the desert coast land.
In a place like Australia or the coast of Chile even CA if we harvest the sea breeze, morning dew, to water the trees and mangroves can help as first line of action.
There is a devise that use electricity to harvest sea moister
https://youtu.be/G2brxBRnRH4
This guy put this link in your webinar with Michal Kravcik about Australia. He said it is 40 times more effective than naturally occurring. He was going to try in Atacama for corn crops…. We’ll see.
Dear Anastassia, over the past months I have been reading up on the Biotic pump as well been watching some videos and gradually I think I have gained some understanding. There are a few aspects I am not so sure about and thought here is a good place as any other to ask.
1. Keeping the pump going
Quite often there is the diagram showing moist air created by evaporation over the ocean being blown towards land (say by the prevailing wind, westerlies in the northern hemisphere), where it slightly rises, cools and condenses. In addition, if over forests, evapo-transpiration contributes to more rising moisture, i.e. even more moist air condenses. The result of this condensation is a) precipitation, b) radiation of latent heat into space, and b) a drop in pressure above said forest.
If that drop in pressure occurs at a certain altitude (where the clouds form, about 1-2000 meters?), wouldn't then air been drawn _into_ that area above the forest (at the height condensation occurs) from the surroundings (inland and from the ocean) rather than air flowing off to the ocean as shown in the diagram? The cycle would come to a stop shortly after the condensation occurs?
Perhaps exposing my ignorance here, but why does moist air after evapo-transpiration rise? One would think that moist air is heavier _unless_ energy (evaporation enthalpy) was imparted to the forest (through insolation for instance) in order to evaporate water, then more to decrease density and make moist air rise.
And here the second question:
2. Long distance transport
The aforementioned and often produced diagram shows something like a single cell; say, if drawn at scale, perhaps 10-20km wide, half ocean, half land as well as perhaps 1-5km high. This demonstrates to me a biotic pump in operation in a coastal area only. Given that moisture is transported over thousands of kilometres at a certain latitude, what is the mechanism that moves moisture over long distance?
It would not sound plausible to me that a single pump moves air a low altitude using the prevailing winds all the way and the return path also for thousands of kilometres. Rather I could imaging that there are many "pumping cells" , alternating direction perhaps, but with a common group velocity defined by the prevailing winds. Do you have a model for that and a diagram that visualises the long distance transport of moisture.
If there is such a mechanism, i.e. a chain of pumping cells, which sounds quite likely, it then follows that it only needs a deforested area as wide as a cell is big, running perpendicular to the prevailing wind over a sufficiently large distance, the entire moisture transport would be compromised; downstream cells would be deprived of new moisture.
Hello, Peter! Thank you for your thoughtful questions. They require an equally thougtful response. I will see to provide it either here or perhaps writing another post on Biotic Pump Q&A No. 2, combining some other questions that I have so far received. Hope to get this done still in January.