ENV 100
April 15 2013
The Rainforest Ecosystem
“In an average year in a tropical rain forest, the climate is very humid because of all the rainfall, which amounts to about 250 cm per year” ("Discover The Rainforest ", 2011). The rain forest has large amounts of rain because it is very hot and wet. Tropical rainforests are defined by rainfall. They would not survive without it. Not all rain forests have tropical sunny weather. “Subtropical rainforests that lay outside of the tropics have seasonal changes in their weather there is a little difference between the warmest and the coolest months. The relative humidity is always high” ("Rainforest Climate",2001). …show more content…
An excellent example of the water cycle is the Amazon Rainforest. While some locations of the Amazon rainforest close to Iquitos, Peru do not appear to have a very articulate wet and dry season, most locations of the rainforest do. “Dry seasons are usually defined as a month where there is fewer than four inches of rainfall in a certain month”(Kricher, 1997). The rainy season changes throughout the tropics with respect to the month in which begins, the period of the season and the intensity. During the rainy season the days are usually cloudy with ceasing rain throughout the day, the heaviest rains, happens in the late afternoons and evenings. In the dry season the sun can shine for up to ten hours a day, even though there is sometimes a shower in the afternoon. “Rainforests take in so much of the earth’s carbon dioxide that scientists call them carbon sinks, and the biggest carbon sink in the world today is the Amazon Basin Rainforest Ecosystem (ABRE), and deforestation is changing the carbon dioxide absorbing capabilities of the ABRE” ("Project Amazonia: Characterization - Abiotic - Nutrient Cycles", 2002). These growing temperatures have a broad effect on the