The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has a pronounced influence on year-to-year variations in climate1. The response of fires to this forcing2 is complex and has not been evaluated systematically across different continents. Here we use satellite data to create a climatology of burned-area and fire-emissions responses, drawing on six El Niño and six La Niña events during 1997–2016.

While carbon dioxide emissions from energy use must be the primary target of climate change mitigation efforts, land use and land cover change (LULCC) also represent an important source of climate forcing.

We evaluate the Community Atmosphere Model Version 5 (CAM5) with a higher-order turbulence closure scheme, named Cloud Layers Unified By Binomials (CLUBB), and a Multiscale Modeling Framework, referred as the “super-parameterization” (SP) with two different microphysics configurations to investigate their influences on rainfall simulations over Southern Amazonia. The two different microphysics configurations in SP are the one-moment cloud microphysics without aerosol treatment (SP1) and two-moment cloud microphysics coupled with aerosol treatment (SP2).

The world’s forests play a pivotal role in the mitigation of global climate change. By photosynthesis they remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store carbon in their biomass. While old trees are generally acknowledged for a long carbon residence time, there is no consensus on their contribution to carbon accumulation due to a lack of long-term individual tree data. Tree ring analyses, which use anatomical differences in the annual formation of wood for dating growth zones, are a retrospective approach that provides growth patterns of individual trees over their entire lifetime.