Performance and changes of high-resolution (1 km) surface air temperature in Northern Hemisphere permafrost regions Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • AbstractSurface air temperatures are significant indicators of environmental and climatic change that affect a diverse set of physical systems including permafrost. Most temperature products, such as gridded or reanalysis data, are still at a relatively low spatial resolution, limiting the ability to simulate heterogeneous permafrost changes and leading to large uncertainties. Here we apply a downscaling method based on elevation to obtain highresolution surface air temperatures from the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project in Northern Hemisphere permafrost regions. Rootmeansquare errors and mean absolute errors after downscaling are reduced by 34 and 37%, respectively, relative to meteorological site data and gridded observations from the Climatic Research Unit. Compared to the downscaled surface air temperature data, nondownscaled model projections overestimate by 0.120.39C in the discontinuous, isolated, and sporadic permafrost regions and underestimate up to 0.18C in the continuous permafrost region under different emission scenarios. The warming rates in Northern Hemisphere permafrost regions were 0.093C/10year during the historical (18502014) period and are projected to be 0.22C/10year for SSP12.6, 0.48C/10year for SSP24.5, 0.75C/10year for SSP37.0, and 0.95C/10year for SSP58.5 during 20152100, which is 1.41.6 times the warming of nonpermafrost regions. Warming rates in high latitudes are 1.21.7 times higher than those in highelevation regions. Continuous permafrost regions' warming will be 1.21.4 times higher than in other permafrost regions. For permafrost with high ground ice content, warming will be 1.1 times greater than in permafrost regions with medium or low ground ice content.

published proceedings

  • INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLIMATOLOGY

altmetric score

  • 12

author list (cited authors)

  • Jin, H., Peng, X., Frauenfeld, O., Zhao, Y., Li, X., Tian, W., ... Mu, C.

citation count

  • 1

publication date

  • March 2023

publisher