Gérard Moss is a bush pilot in the swashbuckling tradition. Born in Britain and raised in Switzerland, he had flown twice round the world in his single-engine plane before he set out on a new journey, to track rain clouds across the Amazon in his adopted home of Brazil. Local scientists had an idea: that the forests of the Amazon were the continent’s biggest rainmakers; that most of the moisture in the clouds had been taken up and recycled back into the air five or six times by its 400 billion or so trees. Take away the trees, reasoned biologists such as Antonio Nobre, then of the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, and the rains would die. The Amazon basin would turn to desert. But with the rainforest largely a black hole for meteorological data, the idea was just that – until they hired Moss to equip his plane to collect water vapour. Moss’ flights over the Amazon a decade ago tracked the moisture-laden South American low-level jet, a concentrated air flow that Nobre called a “flying river”. On one trip, Moss followed the jet for eight days from northeast to southwest across the rainforest, before tracking it east to Sao Paulo, the biggest city in South America. To view the full article visit Post Magazine.
