Permafrost sensitivity to soil hydro-thermodynamics in historical and scenario simulations with the MPI-ESM

García-Pereira, Félix; González-Rouco, Jesús Fidel; Meabe-Yanguas, Nagore; de Vrese, Philipp; Steinert, Norman Julius; Jungclaus, Johann; Lorenz, Stephan

doi:10.5194/tc-19-5959-2025

Articles | Volume 19, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-5959-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-5959-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 11

Research article

|

20 Nov 2025

Research article |

| 20 Nov 2025

Permafrost sensitivity to soil hydro-thermodynamics in historical and scenario simulations with the MPI-ESM

Félix García-Pereira, Jesús Fidel González-Rouco, Nagore Meabe-Yanguas, Philipp de Vrese, Norman Julius Steinert, Johann Jungclaus, and Stephan Lorenz

Data sets

Dataset: Permafrost sensitivity to soil hydro-thermodynamics in historical and scenario simulations with the MPI-ESM Félix García-Pereira et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17454575

Dataset: Evaluating permafrost definitions for global permafrost area estimates in CMIP6 climate models Norman Julius Steinert et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10103001

ESA Permafrost Climate Change Initiative (Permafrost_cci): Permafrost extent for the Northern Hemisphere, v3.0 Jaroslav Obu et al. https://doi.org/10.5285/6e2091cb0c8b4106921b63cd5357c97c

Short summary

This work shows that changing the hydrological state of permafrost produces differences of up to 3 °C in the annual ground temperature, 1–2 m in the active layer thickness, and 5 million km² in the permafrost extent. Including a deeper vertical thermal scheme reduces the extent decline by more than 2 million km² in the highest radiative emission scenario. This is shown for the first time in fully-coupled experiments with an Earth System Model.