The seasonal snow-cover is one of the most rapidly varying natural surface features on Earth. It strongly modulates the terrestrial water, energy, and carbon balance. Fractional snow-covered area (fSCA) is an essential ...

Iceland’s periglacial realm is one of the most dynamic on the planet, with active geomorphologicalprocesses and high weathering rates of young bedrock resulting in high sediment yields and ongoingmass movement. Permafrost ...

Permafrost is present within almost all of the Antarctic's ice-free areas, but little is known about spatial variations in permafrost temperatures except for a few areas with established ground temperature measurements. ...

Methane emissions from natural wetlands tend to increase with temperature and therefore may lead to a positive feedback under future climate change. However, their temperature response includes confounding factors and ...

The FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over ...

To address the long-standing underrepresentation of the influences of highly variable ground ice content on the trajectory of permafrost conditions simulated in Earth system models under a warming climate, we implement a ...

Abstract. Ice-wedge polygons are common features of lowland tundra in the continuous permafrost zone and prone to rapid degradation through melting of ground ice. There are many interrelated processes involved in ice-wedge ...

Spatial variability in high-relief landscapes is immense, and grid-based models cannot be run at spatial resolutions to explicitly represent important physical processes. This hampers the assessment of the current and ...

Permafrost in steep rock slopes has been increasingly studied since the early 2000s in conjunction with a growing number of rock slope failures, which likely resulted from permafrost degradation. In Norway, rock slope ...

Peat plateaus and palsas are characteristic morphologies of sporadic permafrost, and the transition from permafrost to permafrost‐free ground typically occurs on spatial scales of meters. They are particularly vulnerable ...

Earth system models (ESMs) are our primary tool for projecting future climate change, but their ability to represent small-scale land surface processes is currently limited. This is especially true for permafrost landscapes ...

Warming and degradation of permafrost during the ongoing climate change is of growing concern. Recently, permafrost thawing has been recognized as a new factor triggering landslides in Iceland. Therefore, there is an ...

The thermal regime in steep and snow-free rock slopes is crucial for understanding rock slope stability, frost weathering and the associated material production in steep mountain areas. In this study, we model heat flow ...

Ongoing climate change is causing fundamental changes in the Arctic, some of which can be hazardous to nature and human activity. In the context of Earth surface systems, warming climate may lead to rising ground temperatures ...

Thawing of subsea permafrost can impact offshore infrastructure, affect coastal erosion, and release permafrost organic matter. Thawing is usually modeled as the result of heat transfer, although salt diffusion may play ...

Permafrost is a key element of the cryosphere and an essential climate variable in the Global Climate Observing System. There is no remote-sensing method available to reliably monitor the permafrost thermal state. To ...

Subarctic permafrost peatlands are important soil organic carbon pools, and improved knowledge about peat properties and peatland sensitivity to past climate change is essential when predicting future response to a warmer ...

With its high albedo, low thermal conductivity and large water storing capacity, snow strongly modulates the surface energy and water balance, which makes it a critical factor in mid- to high-latitude and mountain en- ...

Degradation of near-surface permafrost can pose a serious threat to the utilization of natural resources, and to the sustainable development of Arctic communities. Here we identify at unprecedentedly high spatial resolution ...

Temperature changes in the Arctic have notable impacts on ecosystem structure and functioning, on soil carbon dynamics, and on the stability of permafrost, thus affecting ecosystem functions and putting man-built infrastructure ...

Low-land permafrost areas are subject to intense freeze-thaw cycles and characterized by remarkable surface displacement. We used Sentinel-1 SAR interferometry (InSAR) in order to analyse the summer surface displacement ...

Most permafrost is located in the Arctic, where frozen organic carbon makes it an important component of the global climate system. Despite the fact that the Arctic climate changes more rapidly than the rest of the globe, ...

Remotely-sensed climate data records (CDRs) provide a basis for spatially distributed global climate model (GCM) inputs and validation methods. GCMs can take advantage of land surface models (LSMs), which aim to resolve ...

Snow cover is one of the crucial factors influencing the plant distribution in harsh Arctic regions. In tundra environments, wind redistribution of snow leads to a very heterogeneous spatial distribution which influences ...

Palsas and peat plateaus are permafrost landforms occurring in subarctic mires which constitute sensitive ecosystems with strong significance for vegetation, wildlife, hydrology and carbon cycle. Firstly, we have systematically ...

It is important that climate models can accurately simulate the terrestrial carbon cycle in the Arctic due to the large and potentially labile carbon stocks found in permafrost-affected environments, which can lead to a ...

A mosaic approach to represent subgrid snow variation in a coupled atmosphere–land surface model (WRF–Noah) is introduced and tested. Solid precipitation is scaled in 10 subgrid tiles based on precalculated snow distributions, ...

Permafrost is a sensitive element of the cryosphere, but operational monitoring of the ground thermal conditions on large spatial scales is still lacking. Here, we demonstrate a remote-sensing-based scheme that is capable ...

The strong winds prevalent in high altitude and arctic environments heavily redistribute the snow cover, causing a small-scale pattern of highly variable snow depths. This has profound implications for the ground thermal ...

In permafrost environments exposed to strong winds, drifting snow can create a small-scale pattern of strongly variable snow heights, which has profound implications for the thermal regime of the ground. Arrays of 26 to ...

Background Global environmental change is causing spatial and temporal shifts in the distribution of species and the associated diseases of humans, domesticated animals and wildlife. In the on-going debate ...

Thermal modeling is a powerful tool to infer the temperature regime of the ground in permafrost areas. We present a transient permafrost model, CryoGrid 2, that calculates ground temperatures according to conductive heat ...