Assessment of Soil Temperature and Its Change Trends in the Permafrost Regions of the Northern Hemisphere

Abstract

In this paper, we used data from 42 soil temperature observation sites in permafrost regions throughout the Northern Hemisphere to analyze the characteristics and variability in soil temperature. The observation data were used to evaluate soil temperature simulations at different depths from 10 CMIP6 models in the permafrost region of the Northern Hemisphere. The results showed that the annual average soil temperature in the permafrost regions in the Northern Hemisphere gradually decreased with increasing latitude, and the soil temperature gradually decreased with depth. The average soil temperatures at different depths were mainly concentrated around 0 °C. The 10 CMIP6 models performed well in simulating soil temperature, but most models tended to underestimate temperatures compared to the measured values. Overall, the CESM2 model yielded the best simulation results, whereas the CNRM-CM6-1 model performed the worst. The change trends in annual average soil temperature across the 42 sites ranged from −0.17 °C/10a to 0.41 °C/10a from 1900 to 2014, the closer to the Arctic, the faster the soil warming rate. The rate of soil temperature change also varied at different depths between 1900–2014 and 1980–2014. The rate of soil temperature change from 1980 to 2014 was approximately three times greater than that from 1900 to 2014.