A decade of glaciological and meteorological observations in the Arctic (Werenskioldbreen, Svalbard)

The warming of the Arctic climate is well documented, but the mechanisms of Arctic amplification are still not fully understood. Thus, monitoring of glaciological and meteorological variables and the environmental response to accelerated climate warming must be continued and developed in Svalbard. Long-term meteorological observations carried out in situ on glaciers in conjunction with glaciological monitoring are rare in the Arctic and significantly expand our knowledge about processes in the polar environment. This study presents glaciological and meteorological data collected for 2009-2020 in southern Spitsbergen (Werenskioldbreen). The meteorological data are composed of air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, short-wave and long-wave upwelling and downwelling radiation on 10 min, hourly and daily resolution (2009-2020). The snow dataset includes 49 data records from 2009 to 2019 with the snow depth, snow bulk density and snow water equivalent data. The glaciological data consist of seasonal and annual surface mass balance measurements (point and glacier-wide) for 2009-2020. The paper also includes modelling of the daily glacier surface ablation (2009-2020) based on the presented data. The datasets are expected to serve as local forcing data in hydrological and glaciological models as well as validation of calibration of remote sensing products. The datasets are available from the Polish Polar Database (https://ppdb.us.edu.pl/, last access: 24 May 2022) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6528321, Ignatiuk, 2021a; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5792168, Ignatiuk, 2021b).

Automated summary

The warming of the Arctic climate, known as Arctic amplification, is the focus of this study, which presents glaciological and meteorological data collected in southern Spitsbergen from 2009 to 2020. The data includes air temperature, humidity, wind speed, radiation, snow depth, snow density, and glacier mass balance measurements. The datasets serve as valuable resources for studying processes in the polar environment and can be used for hydrological and glaciological modeling and remote sensing product calibration.