Read more about it in Wired's article: A Revelation About Trees Is Messing With Climate Calculations.
When clouds empty themselves some kilometers inland, they are exhausted and cease to exist.
So, how on earth do we get rain much farther inland? After all, all the clouds that drift overland from a nearby sea are spent.
Well, forests are the main water transportation mechanism for clouds deeply overland. Trees release a lot of water vapor, together with oxygen. They also inhale carbon dioxide, so when I walk in a forest and I in- and exhale I'm feeding the trees as much as they are feeding me.
Now a new discovery show yet one more way in which woodlands can "seed" clouds 🤔
In a paper published this month in Science Advances, Dada's team establishes a new heavy hitter in cloud creation: a kind of chemical released by trees. Trees emit natural volatiles like isoprene and monoterpenes, which can spark cloud-forming chemical reactions. Dada's new work focuses on an overlooked class of less abundant volatiles called sesquiterpenes, which smell woody, earthy, citrusy, or spicy, depending on the molecule and type of plant or microbe that emits them.
The team shows that sesquiterpenes are more effective than expected for seeding clouds. A mere 1-to-50 ratio of sesquiterpene to other volatiles doubledcloud formation.
Read more about it in Wired's article: A Revelation About Trees Is Messing With Climate Calculations.
