Sebastian Bathiany

CL Climate: Past, Present & Future

The 2010 Young Scientist Outstanding Poster Paper (YSOPP) Award is awarded to Sebastian Bathiany for the poster/PICO entitled:

Do forests cool the planet? (Bathiany, S.; Claussen, M.; Brovkin, V.; Raddatz, T.; Gayler, V.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Sebastian Bathiany is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He is working on multiple equilibria of the atmosphere-vegetation system and the prediction and detection of rapid transitions, such as the vegetation collaps in the Western Sahara at the end of the African Humid Period. His EGU poster presents the results of his diploma thesis in which he investigated the climate changes after large-scale deforestation and afforestation in a comprehensive climate model. While tropical deforestation leads to a warming due to CO2 emissions and reduced evapotranspiration, boreal deforestation cools (and boreal afforestation warms) the planet because of the snow masking effect of trees.