Abstract
The Amazon forest has recently experienced substantial human-induced loss of forest cover. However, the extent to which such historical deforestation has altered regional observed precipitation through inter-regional atmospheric moisture transport remains unclear. Here, we combine satellite observations and an atmospheric moisture tracking model to quantify these feedbacks over the past four decades (1980-2019). We identify a contrasting northern increase and southern decrease dipole trend in observed precipitation across the Amazon basin. The pronounced reduction in precipitation for the southern Amazon basin reaches up to 3.9-5.4 mm yr-1 per year, resulting in an 8-11% decline in annual precipitation across the observation period. We discover that this reduction in precipitation is primarily (52-72%) related to widespread deforestation in the southern basin and upwind regions over South America. Deforestation substantially suppresses forest-sourced moisture, increases atmospheric stability and moisture outflow, leading to precipitation reduction. We also find that climate models substantially underestimate the sensitivity of precipitation to deforestation, implying that the Amazon forest is at risk of major loss much sooner than previously projected.
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Data availability
GPCP v2.3 precipitation data are available at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcp.html. GPCC (full data, v2022) precipitation data are available at https://opendata.dwd.de/climate_environment/GPCC/html/download_gate.html. In-situ discharge data are from Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC; Koblenz, Germany: https://www.bafg.de/GRDC/EN/Home/homepage_node.html). GLEAM) v3.5a evapotranspiration data are available at https://www.gleam.eu/. OAFlux ocean evaporation is available at https://oaflux.whoi.edu. Flux tower observation can be accessed at https://daac.ornl.gov/LBA/guides/CD32_Fluxes_Brazil.html. ERA5 atmospheric and land-surface wind, humidity and fluxes datasets are available at https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5. Forest cover is available at https://glad.umd.edu/dataset/long-term-global-land-change. TPDC solar radiation is freely access at https://doi.org/10.11888/Meteoro.tpdc.270112. Future land use data are available at https://luh.umd.edu/ and https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1153. The dataset on the fate of land evapotranspiration and precipitation sources is available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.908705. Projected precipitation recycling is obtained from https://zenodo.org/records/10650579. Wind speed from CMIP6 can be accessed at https://aims2.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The codes for WAM-2layers are available via the https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7010594 or at https://github.com/WAM2layers/WAM2layers. The data are processed with Matlab R2021b. The codes for the key methods and Matlab data files related to this work are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29649002.v2.
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Acknowledgements
This article was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42522506 and 42471113; J.P.C.) and by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP) program (2024QZKK0301; J.P.C.). The authors would like to thank Ruud van der Ent for his helpful suggestions on the paper.
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S.L.P. and J.P.C. designed the research; J.P.C. performed the analysis. J.P.C. and C.H. drafted the paper. J.P.C., S.L.P., C.H., T.W. and D.V.S. contributed to the interpretation of the results and to the text.
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Cui, J., Piao, S., Huntingford, C. et al. Historical deforestation drives strong rainfall decline across the southern Amazon basin. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68361-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68361-z
