Northern Latitudes Getting Greener with Warmer Temperatures
Copyright 2001 EarthVision Environmental News
September 12, 2001
WASHINGTON, September 12, 2001 - Researchers have revealed that satellite data focused on regions of the globe above 40 degrees north latitude, which includes areas above New York, Madrid, Ankara, and Beijing, are showing more plant life now than two decades ago due to warmer weather. This greening is more advanced in Eurasia than North America say the researchers from Boston University and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Although the researchers say the plant range has not extended, the density of existing vegetation has increased.
"When we looked at temperature and satellite vegetation data, we saw that year to year changes in growth and duration of the growing season of northern vegetation are tightly linked to year to year changes in temperature," says Liming Zhou, of Boston University, who along with university colleagues Robert Kaufmann, Nikolai Shabanov and Ranga Myneni, and Daniel Slayback and Compton Tucker of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center describe their research in the September 16 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
The researchers showed a correlation between the amount of greenery in the regions and an increased global temperature, supported by thousands of meteorological stations on both continents. This increase in temperature is attributed to the greenhouse effect, or the result of accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trapping heat on the planet. Accompanying the change in greenery is a Eurasian growing season that is now almost 18 days longer, on average, with spring arriving a week early and autumn delayed by 10 days. In North America, the growing season appears to be as much as 12 days longer.