A 16-year record (2002–2017) of permafrost, active-layer, and meteorological conditions at the Samoylov Island Arctic permafrost research site, Lena River delta, northern Siberia: an opportunity to validate remote-sensing data and land surface, snow, and permafrost models

摘要

Abstract. Most of the world's permafrost is located in theArctic, where its frozen organic carbon content makes it a potentiallyimportant influence on the global climate system. The Arctic climate appearsto be changing more rapidly than the lower latitudes, but observational datadensity in the region is low. Permafrost thaw and carbon release into theatmosphere, as well as snow cover changes, are positive feedback mechanismsthat have the potential for climate warming. It is therefore particularlyimportant to understand the links between the energy balance, which can varyrapidly over hourly to annual timescales, and permafrost conditions, whichchanges slowly on decadal to centennial timescales. This requires long-termobservational data such as that available from the Samoylov research site innorthern Siberia, where meteorological parameters, energy balance, andsubsurface observations have been recorded since 1998. This paper presentsthe temporal data set produced between 2002 and 2017, explaining theinstrumentation, calibration, processing, and data quality control.Furthermore, we present a merged data set of the parameters, which weremeasured from 1998 onwards. Additional data include a high-resolution digitalterrain model (DTM) obtained from terrestrial lidar laser scanning. Since thedata provide observations of temporally variable parameters that influenceenergy fluxes between permafrost, active-layer soils, and the atmosphere(such as snow depth and soil moisture content), they are suitable forcalibrating and quantifying the dynamics of permafrost as a component inearth system models. The data also include soil properties beneath differentmicrotopographic features (a polygon centre, a rim, a slope, and a trough),yielding much-needed information on landscape heterogeneity for use in landsurface modelling. For the record from 1998 to 2017, the average mean annual air temperaturewas ?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 169mm. The depth ofzero annual amplitude is at 20.75m. At this depth, the temperature hasincreased 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.