CARVE-ARCSS: Methane Loss From Arctic- Fluxes From the Alaskan North Slope, 2012-2014
Climate change in the Arctic is most rapid in the cold seasons, which have experienced strongly increasing temperatures and snow depths. This data set reports the first year-round measurements of emissions of methane (CH4) from Arctic tundra, with surprising results showing that cold season emissions are substantial, accounting for more than half the annual efflux of CH4 from these systems to the atmosphere across all the sites measured.
This data set provides the results of (1) year-round measurements of methane (CH4) flux along with soil and air temperatures at five eddy covariance towers at sites located in the Alaskan Arctic tundra from June 2013 to December 2014 and (2) airborne CH4 and ozone (O3) measurements collected during Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) flight campaigns for years 2012 through 2014. Also reported are daily mean methane flux, soil temperature with depth, and air temperature for each tower site. For each flux tower site, the authors identified the "zero curtain" periods of extended cold when soil temperatures were poised near 0 degrees C. The positions of the airborne measurements were treated as receptors in a Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport (STILT) model coupled with meteorology fields from the polar variant of the Weather and Research Forecasting model (WRF), in order to model the land surface influence on the aircraft-observed methane concentrations. For each airborne measurement, 2D surface influence fields (i.e., footprints in netCDF files) at two different spatial resolutions were derived using the WRF-STILT simulations. Regional C-CH4 fluxes were calculated from the CARVE CH4 data and footprints for the period 2012-2014 and are also included with this data set.
Data Acknowledgements
Data authors: Zona, D., W. Oechel, C.E. Miller, S.J. Dinardo, R. Commane, J.O.W. Lindaas, R.Y-W. Chang, S.C. Wofsy, C. Sweeney, and A. Karion.
Data Set DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1300
Data center: ORNL DAAC
Data Center Sponsor: NASA EOSDIS
