Rainforest Canopy Cover & Precipitation Interception Affecting Climate Change & Global Warming

Rainforest Canopy Cover & Precipitation Interception Affecting Climate Change & Global Warming | Our Amazing Planet:
With billions of overlapping leaves, stretching sometimes for hundreds of feet above the ground, the canopies of the world's rainforests act like giant umbrellas – catching rain before it has a chance to reach the forest floor. It turns out that these arboreal umbrellas intercept almost 2 trillion gallons of rain each year, a new study that could improve our understanding of the impacts of climate change finds.

That's about 20 percent of the rain that falls from the sky over the world's forests. The massive amounts of rain essentially puddle up on the leaves before evaporating back into the atmosphere. While scientists have estimated rain interception for specific forests before, Diego Miralles, a researcher at VU University in Amsterdam and lead author of the new study, says this is the first global estimate.