Abstract
Abstract. The alpine region is important in riverine and watershed ecosystems as a contributor of freshwater, providing and stimulating specific habitats for biodiversity. In parallel, recent climate change, human activities and other perturbations may disturb hydrological processes and eco-functions, creating the need for next-generation observational and modeling approaches to advance a predictive understanding of such processes in the alpine region. However, several formidable challenges, including the cold and harsh climate, high altitude and complex topography, inhibit complete and consistent data collection where and when it is needed, which hinders the development of remote-sensing technologies and alpine hydrological models. The current study presents a suite of datasets consisting of long-term hydrometeorological, snow cover and frozen-ground data for investigating watershed science and functions from an integrated, distributed and multiscale observation network in the upper reaches of the Heihe River Basin (HRB) in China. Meteorological and hydrological data were monitored from an observation network connecting a group of automatic meteorological stations (AMSs). In addition, to capture snow accumulation and ablation processes, snow cover properties were collected from a snow observation superstation using state-of-the-art techniques and instruments. High-resolution soil physics datasets were also obtained to capture the freeze–thaw processes from a frozen-ground observation superstation. The updated datasets were released to scientists with multidisciplinary backgrounds (i.e., cryospheric science, hydrology and meteorology), and they are expected to serve as a testing platform to provide accurate forcing data and validate and evaluate remote-sensing products and hydrological models for a broader community. The datasets are available from the Cold and Arid Regions Science Data Center at Lanzhou (https://doi.org/10.3972/hiwater.001.2019.db, Li, 2019).
Highlights
Water resources in the alpine region are headwaters to sustain downstream ecosystems
The current study presents a suite of datasets consisting of long-term hydrometeorological, snow cover and frozen-ground data for investigating watershed science and functions from an integrated, distributed and multiscale observation network in the upper reaches of the Heihe River Basin (HRB) in China
This paper introduces the infrastructure of the integrated alpine hydrology observation network in the HRB and the complete datasets collected in recent years
Summary
Water resources in the alpine region are headwaters to sustain downstream ecosystems. The INARCH has since connected individual observatories into an international network and data-sharing platform to lead frontier research on alpine region hydrometeorology and snow observation Another community-based observation network, the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) network, was initiated in the early 1990s to observe the response of the active layer and near-surface permafrost to climate change (Brown et al, 2000). Composed of seven standard automatic meteorological stations (AMSs), one snow superstation and one frozen-ground superstation, the observation network serves as an integrated research platform aiming to provide prominent datasets (e.g., hydrometeorology, snow and frozen ground) of the hydrometeorological processes in the upper reaches of the HRB, which is expected to support alpine region hydrological model development and simulations, along with remote-sensing observations.
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