Abstract
Abstract. Most of the world's permafrost is located in the Arctic, where its frozen organic carbon content makes it a potentially important influence on the global climate system. The Arctic climate appears to be changing more rapidly than the lower latitudes, but observational data density in the region is low. Permafrost thaw and carbon release into the atmosphere, as well as snow cover changes, are positive feedback mechanisms that have the potential for climate warming. It is therefore particularly important to understand the links between the energy balance, which can vary rapidly over hourly to annual timescales, and permafrost conditions, which changes slowly on decadal to centennial timescales. This requires long-term observational data such as that available from the Samoylov research site in northern Siberia, where meteorological parameters, energy balance, and subsurface observations have been recorded since 1998. This paper presents the temporal data set produced between 2002 and 2017, explaining the instrumentation, calibration, processing, and data quality control. Furthermore, we present a merged data set of the parameters, which were measured from 1998 onwards. Additional data include a high-resolution digital terrain model (DTM) obtained from terrestrial lidar laser scanning. Since the data provide observations of temporally variable parameters that influence energy fluxes between permafrost, active-layer soils, and the atmosphere (such as snow depth and soil moisture content), they are suitable for calibrating and quantifying the dynamics of permafrost as a component in earth system models. The data also include soil properties beneath different microtopographic features (a polygon centre, a rim, a slope, and a trough), yielding much-needed information on landscape heterogeneity for use in land surface modelling. For the record from 1998 to 2017, the average mean annual air temperature was −12.3 ∘C, with mean monthly temperature of the warmest month (July) recorded as 9.5 ∘C and for the coldest month (February) −32.7 ∘C. The average annual rainfall was 169 mm. The depth of zero annual amplitude is at 20.75 m. At this depth, the temperature has increased from −9.1 ∘C in 2006 to −7.7 ∘C in 2017. The presented data are freely available through the PANGAEA (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.891142) and Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/2223709, last access: 6 February 2019) websites.
Highlights
Permafrost, which is defined as ground that remains frozen continuously for 2 years or more, underlies large parts of the land surface in the Northern Hemisphere, amounting to about 15 million km2 (Aalto et al, 2018; Brown et al, 1998; Zhang et al, 2000)
This paper presents, for the first time, a complete data archive and descriptions in the form of the following data sets: (i) a full range of meteorological, soil thermal, and hydrologic data from the research site covering the period between 2002 and 2017 (Fig. 2), (ii) high spatial resolution data from terrestrial laser scanning of the research site completed in 2017, with resulting data sets for a digital terrain model and for vegetation height, (iii) time-lapse camera images, and (iv) a data set containing specially compiled or processed data sets for those parameters that were measured in the period from 1998 to 2002, extending the record to form a long-term data set, as initiated in Boike et al (2013)
The monitoring of essential climate variables (ECVs) for permafrost has been delegated to the Global Terrestrial Network on Permafrost (GTN-P), which was developed in the 1990s by the International Permafrost Association under the
Summary
Permafrost, which is defined as ground that remains frozen continuously for 2 years or more, underlies large parts of the land surface in the Northern Hemisphere, amounting to about 15 million km (Aalto et al, 2018; Brown et al, 1998; Zhang et al, 2000). The soil’s water content determines its hydrological and thermal properties, and the energy exchange (including latent heat conversion or release) and biogeochemical processes. In view of these dependencies, the data sets presented here, including snow cover and the thermal state of the soil and permafrost, together with meteorological data, will be of great value (i) for evaluating permafrost models or land surface models, (ii) for satellite calibration and validation (cal/val) missions, (iii) in continuing baseline studies for future trend analysis (for example, of the permafrost’s thermal state), and (iv) for biological or biogeochemical studies. We present data that incorporate subsurface thermal and hydrologic components of heat flux as well as of snow cover properties and meteorological data from the Samoylov research site that are similar to the data published previously for a Spitsbergen permafrost site (Boike et al, 2018a)
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