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Water and forests are inextricably linked. Forests play a critical role in making it rain, influencing rainfall patterns, giving us drinking water, moderating destructive floods, combatting drought and keeping us cool. Trees directly influence cloud formation by emitting chemicals called volatile organic compounds (VOC) into the atmosphere: -- water vapour condenses on these VOCs, to form raindrops. Trees, especially in tropical forests, pump large amounts of water from the soil through their leaves and release it into the atmosphere by the process known as evapo-transpiration.
This process has important consequences: not only does the evaporation cool the forest but also the water vapour rises, creating convection currents, and cooling as it rises.
The prevailing wind then transports this rising vapour downwind where it will fall as rain – a process that has inescapable and profound implications for land management.