A new NASA-funded study has concluded that Amazon rain forests
were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century
drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a
previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. "We found no big differences in the
greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought
years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of
droughts than we previously thought," said Arindam Samanta, the
study's lead author from Boston University. The comprehensive
study published in the current issue of the scientific journal
Geophysical Research Letters used the latest version of the NASA
MODIS satellite data to measure the greenness of these vast
pristine forests over the past decade. A study published in the
journal Science in 2007 claimed that these forests actually
thrive from drought because of more sunshine under cloud-less
skies typical of drought conditions. The new study found that
those results were flawed