When it comes to climate change and the Amazon rainforest, the news is never good.

Reality — Armed with their model, Green and her colleagues then compared typical predictions of land surface simulations to what's actually going on in the Amazon.

"What we were seeing is that in model simulations with just a little bit of dryness, the photosynthesis in these rainforest regions was really decreasing in the models.

The Amazon has a very "dynamic" forest canopy, Green says, which compensates for the closing of the stomata, counterintuitively increasing photosynthesis.

"After the air starts to dry, what ends up happening is that the forest ends up shedding a lot of these old leaves at the top of the canopy," Green says.

But whether the findings suggest the Amazon holds up better against extreme weather events, like drought brought on by climate change, is unclear, Green says

"This study, while it is showing that the forests are more resilient to air dryness than we thought and what's depicted, it's not saying that should air dry out to levels that we haven't seen so far that it's going to be okay," Green says