Articles | Volume 15, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-2273-2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-2273-2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Research article
| 
18 May 2021
Research article |
| 18 May 2021
| 18 May 2021
The surface energy balance in a cold and arid permafrost environment, Ladakh, Himalayas, India
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT),
Roorkee, India
Renoj J. Thayyen
Water Resources System Division, National Institute of
Hydrology, Roorkee, India
deceased
Chandra Shekhar Prasad Ojha
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT),
Roorkee, India
Stephan Gruber
Department of Geography & Environmental
Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
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A 30-year study of Italy's Po River Basin reveals dramatic loss in snow below 2000 meters elevation, with some areas losing over 30 % of snow-water storage. The snow season is becoming shorter, mainly because snow arrives later in winter rather than melting earlier in spring. This represents a fundamental shift from stable to volatile conditions, with major implications for water security in one of Europe's second most climate sensitive areas.
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This research introduces a new model for simulating how melting ground ice in permafrost reshapes the land surface over time. It shows that small differences in soil and the depth where ice is found can cause large differences in how the ground sinks or rises. This helps improves our ability to predict future impacts on terrain, ecosystems, and infrastructure as the climate warms.
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Detecting ground ice in permafrost is crucial for climate research and infrastructure, but traditional methods often struggle to distinguish it. This study examines the dielectric properties of ground ice as a unique fingerprint. Field measurements were taken at two Yukon permafrost sites: a retrogressive thaw slump and a pingo. Comparing these with electrical resistivity and impedance results, we found relaxation time is a more reliable indicator for ground ice detection.
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This paper documents a monitoring network of 54 positions, located on different periglacial landforms in the Swiss Alps: rock glaciers, landslides, and steep rock walls. The data serve basic research but also decision-making and mitigation of natural hazards. It is the largest dataset of its kind, comprising over 209 000 daily positions and additional weather data.
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Inversions of subsurface temperature profiles provide past long-term estimates of ground surface temperature histories and ground heat flux histories at timescales of decades to millennia. Theses estimates complement high-frequency proxy temperature reconstructions and are the basis for studying continental heat storage. We develop and release a new bootstrap method to derive meaningful confidence intervals for the average surface temperature and heat flux histories from any number of profiles.
Élise G. Devoie, Stephan Gruber, and Jeffrey M. McKenzie
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 3365–3377, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-3365-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-3365-2022, 2022
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Soil freezing characteristic curves (SFCCs) relate the temperature of a soil to its ice content. SFCCs are needed in all physically based numerical models representing freezing and thawing soils, and they affect the movement of water in the subsurface, biogeochemical processes, soil mechanics, and ecology. Over a century of SFCC data exist, showing high variability in SFCCs based on soil texture, water content, and other factors. This repository summarizes all available SFCC data and metadata.
Sonali Swetapadma and Chandra Shekhar Prasad Ojha
Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2021-570, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2021-570, 2021
Revised manuscript not accepted
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Entropy has become an effective scientific tool of the 21st century with numerous water resources and hydrology applications. This study explores a new dimension to applying entropy. The principle of maximum entropy theory is used to locate the optimum threshold and the underlying distributions in partial duration series modeling of flood frequency analysis. Comparison of the results with some previous findings suggests the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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We present a new method to compute temperature changes with melting and freezing – a fundamental challenge in cryosphere research – extremely efficiently and with guaranteed correctness of the energy balance for any time step size. This is a key feature since the integration time step can then be chosen according to the timescale of the processes to be studied, from seconds to days.
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Short summary
We study the surface energy balance from a cold-arid permafrost environment in the Indian Himalayan region. The GEOtop model was used for the modelling of surface energy balance. Our results show that the variability in the turbulent heat fluxes is similar to that reported from the seasonally frozen ground and permafrost regions of the Tibetan Plateau. Further, the low relative humidity could be playing a critical role in the surface energy balance and the permafrost processes.
We study the surface energy balance from a cold-arid permafrost environment in the Indian...
