Does tall vegetation warm or cool the ground surface? Constraining the ground thermal impacts of upright vegetation in northern environments

Increased upright vegetation growth (i.e. trees and shrubs) in northern environments can profoundly impact ground surface thermal conditions through winter warming (e.g. enhanced snow trapping) and summer cooling (e.g. increased shading). The debate over these opposite effects emphasizes the need to better constrain net temperature impacts of upright vegetation on soils in northern environments. We generate a series of simulations with a widely-used permafrost model to partition the absolute warming and cooling impacts of upright vegetation on ground surface temperatures for a variety of shading scenarios, climates and surficial materials types (i.e. bedrock, mineral and organic soils). These scenarios simulate annual temperature differences between the air and ground surface caused by upright vegetation to provide likely ranges for the net effects induced by vegetation. These simulations showed that ground surface temperature warming in the winter mostly overwhelmed ground surface cooling in the thawing season even when simulations included extreme shading effects. Constraining the simulations to current best estimates of the possible summer cooling impact of vegetation yielded a dominant winter warming signal for most snow depths and climate types. Differences in the magnitude of air-surface temperature offsets between sites underlain by bedrock, mineral and organic soil highlights the importance of considering differences in unfrozen moisture content in areas where the ground freezes and thaws seasonally. The results of this study suggest that the net ground surface temperature impacts of increased snow trapping by vegetation will far exceed cooling caused by enhanced shading following increases in tall vegetation in most northern environments.

Automated summary

This study utilized simulations to demonstrate that increased upright vegetation in northern environments, leading to enhanced snow trapping, has a greater impact on ground surface temperatures compared to cooling effects from shading.