With the help of SOURCE research funding and the support of his academic mentors, Abdulai Jibril Barrie 鈥26 traveled to Guinea to conduct research at the ground level of unique places where soccer players play. (Photo by Amy Manley)
Researcher Examines Agriculture鈥檚 Role in Regional Climate Extremes
There鈥檚 a lot of research underway about how climate affects agriculture, examining how heat waves reduce crop yields, among other impacts.
But there is some thinking among researchers that the crops also affect the local climate to some extent. Vegetation transpires water, acting as a pump that pulls the moisture from the ground, making the air surrounding it a little more humid, effectively altering the heat index or felt temperature.
Exactly what that impact on the local climate might be is one of the questions , assistant professor of geography and the environment in the , is seeking to understand with his current research.
鈥淯ltimately metrics like the heat index are most important for human heat exposure,鈥 he says.
Examining the influence of crops on local climate isn鈥檛 a new pursuit for him. A few years ago, he published a paper that aimed to estimate the amount of cooling corn crops caused around them.
鈥淭hey reduce basically the amount of heat waves that occur, which is a positive for the crops,鈥 he says. 鈥淎nd so effectively, the crops are modifying the climate in a way that is actually helping the crops grow.鈥
Coffel was awarded a $582,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in 2023 to support his research on agriculture as a driver of climate extremes. With co-investigator Justin Mankin from Dartmouth College, Coffel is the principal investigator for the three-year project, titled Quantifying Agriculture as a Driver of Regional Climate Extremes.
One of the questions he鈥檚 pursuing under the NSF grant is examining how crops, namely the staples of midwest agriculture corn and soy, affect humidity.
鈥淲e want to try to say how much do crops affect the climate around them, and how much does that affect the crops themselves,鈥 he says. 鈥淪o do the crops really make it cooler in a way that reduces the chance of there being heat waves? We think this is probably true. And then also, does that mean the human impacts of heat are reduced? Or are they increased? And that depends on the humidity.鈥
Below, Coffel shares more about his research with 网爆门 Today.
I’m interested in this research because agriculture covers a large amount of the Earth’s surface and has some effects on regional climate, but these effects are not really explored that well. I’m interested in using the tools of climate science to understand how crops affect the weather around them. Hopefully this work will help us better understand how crops respond to the current climate and how they may respond to a warmer future.
The big picture is it’s getting warmer, and there’s a lot of concern warmer temperatures will hurt crops. Even modest reductions in crop yields would have a big impact on the amount of food we produce, which will change global food prices. There have been a number of extreme summers where it’s been hot and dry, which have affected global food production and caused food price shocks. So we’re really interested in the extent to which crops are at risk from future extreme heat and drought.
One of the really important things to understand is what are all of the factors that are influencing temperatures over croplands? So one of them is global warming in general. But the reason we’re focused on this other angle of how do crops affect regional temperatures is a less explored angle. Maybe there are these local effects due to crops reducing the temperatures around them that are important to consider in thinking about the amount of risk crops face from future heat.
Yeah, definitely. So for heat, I think you can frame it as agriculture probably is somewhat of a buffer in that it’s reducing temperatures during the hot summer months and sort of buffering some of the warming that would have occurred otherwise. Then one big question is will this buffering continue in the future? And that is unclear. It depends on how much the world warms and also whether crop productivity continues to increase.
There’s a growing amount of research trying to estimate quantitatively the impacts of warming on a bunch of different systems, like agriculture and energy systems. The world is warming, and there are these impacts which are not immediately visible to people. But they actually are happening.
And we can detect them statistically鈥攚arming has had harmful impacts on crops in general and it has also increased stress on our electrical systems. And while these are not super visible, these are long-term things that are happening and that have pretty significant costs. This is what my work is trying to understand, and it’s a growing field of climate research.
