Comment on essd-2021-464

Abstract

The warming of the Arctic climate is well documented, but the mechanisms of Arctic amplification are still not fully understood. Thus, monitoring of glaciological and meteorological variables and the environmental response to accelerated climate warming must be continued and developed in Svalbard. Long-term meteorological observations carried out in situ on glaciers in conjunction with glaciological monitoring are rare in the Arctic and significantly expand our knowledge about processes in the polar environment. This study presents the unique glaciological and meteorological data collected in 2009–2020 in southern Spitsbergen (Werenskioldbreen). The meteorological data are comprised of air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, shortwave and longwave upwelling and downwelling radiation on 10 minutes, hourly and daily timescale (2009–2020). The snow dataset includes 49 sampling points from 2009–2019 with the snow depth, snow bulk density and SWE data. The glaciological data consist of point and surface annual winter, summer and net balance for 2009–2020. The paper also includes modelling of the daily glacier surface ablation (2009–2020) based on the presented data. The high-quality and long-term datasets are expected to serve as accurate forcing data in hydrological and glaciological models and validation of remote sensing products. The datasets are available from the and Polish Polar Database (https://ppdb.us.edu.pl/) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5791748, Ignatiuk, 2021a; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5792168, Ignatiuk, 2021b).