Effects of short-term variability of meteorological variables on soil temperature in permafrost regions

Beer, Christian; Porada, Philipp; Ekici, Altug; Brakebusch, Matthias

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-741-2018

Articles | Volume 12, issue 2

The Cryosphere, 12, 741–757, 2018

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-741-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue: Changing Permafrost in the Arctic and its Global Effects in...

The Cryosphere, 12, 741–757, 2018

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-741-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 2

Research article 01 Mar 2018

Research article | 01 Mar 2018

Effects of short-term variability of meteorological variables on soil temperature in permafrost regions

Christian Beer et al.

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Final revised paper (published on 01 Mar 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 04 Sep 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'review1', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Sep 2017
- AC1: 'Response to RC1', C. Beer, 08 Dec 2017
RC2: 'Review of Beer et al. manuscript', Anonymous Referee #2, 11 Nov 2017
- AC2: 'Response to RC2', C. Beer, 08 Dec 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Anna Mirena Feist-Polner on behalf of the Authors (22 Dec 2017) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (22 Dec 2017) by Julia Boike

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (05 Jan 2018)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (19 Jan 2018) by Julia Boike

Dear authors,
many thanks for a thorough revision of your paper.
I have only few last corrections that I detail below.
Thanks again for submitting your paper to our PAGE21 special issue.
Julia

Page 7:
- “frost”-enhanced JSBACH model (page 7)
I suggest to replace “frost” with permafrost or “freeze thaw”.

- http://arcticlcc.org/products/spatialdata/show/simulated-mean-annual-ground-temperature
Please provide a citation if available.

-"..respective GTN-P Thermal State of Permafrost (TSP) snapshot data has been dowloaded from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)…”
Please provide the link and potential citation.

- You are using °C and deg C, please unify throughout the paper

Page 10:
-“Under these climate conditions, it is raining more often a little bit and air temperature are not extreme resulting in more moist conditions for lichens and bryophytes, hence higher thermal diffusivity.”
Please correct sentence (air temperature is)

Page 11:
- The increasing differences in the variability of meteorological variables under conserved long-term averages leads
Please correct sentence (lead)

Page 12:
- “the direction of the conclusions are carefully inverted in this discussion section.”
Please rephrase, it is not clear what this sentence means (as already suggested by the reviewer).
Why is this text bolded and highlighted? I suggest to remove this format.

Page 22: Figure 4: Please correct format (a and b should be aligned)?
Page 23: Figure 6: Please align figures.

None of your figures have a- d labeling, but captions refer to a-d. Please add.

Page 14: Conclusion
-Overall, the soil temperature response to increasing climate variability and extreme event frequency (soil cooling) will be opposite to the response of soil temperature to gradually increasing air temperature (soil warming). This shows the importance of representing dynamically snow and lichen and bryophyte functions in Earth system models for projecting future permafrost soil states and land-atmosphere interactions, hence future climate.

I do not understand why these sentences are connected (“This shows..”). Please add an explanatory sentence connecting these two sentences.

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AR by Christian Beer on behalf of the Authors (22 Jan 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (25 Jan 2018) by Julia Boike

Short summary

Idealized model experiments demonstrate that, in addition to a gradual climate change, changing daily to weekly variability of meteorological variables and extreme events will also have an impact on mean annual ground temperature in high-latitude permafrost areas. In fact, results of the land surface model experiments show that the projected increase of variability of meteorological variables leads to cooler permafrost soil in contrast to an otherwise soil warming in response to climate change.