The impact that local deforestation might have on the snowcap and glaciers atop Mount Kilimanjaro are being calculated at The University of Alabama in Huntsville using regional climate models and data from NASA satellites.

The first piece of that research, which looked only at the month of July, found that deforestation is changing weather patterns around the mountain but not (at least in July) at the peak, according to Dr. Udaysankar Nair, a research scientist in UAHuntsville’s Earth System Science Center.