Permafrost, active layer, and meteorological data (2010-2020) at the Mahan Mountain relict permafrost site of northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Relict permafrost presents an ideal opportunity to understand the impacts of climatic warming on the ground thermal regime since it is characterized by a mean annual ground temperature close to 0 degrees C and relatively thin permafrost. The long-term and continuous observations of permafrost thermal state and climate background are of great importance to reveal the links between the energy balance on hourly to annual timescales, to evaluate the variations in permafrost thermal state over multiannual periods and to validate the remote sensing dataset. We present 11 years of meteorological and soil data from the Mahan Mountain relict permafrost site of northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The meteorological data comprise air and land surface temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, shortwave and longwave downwards and upwards radiation, water vapor pressure, and precipitation on a half-hour timescale. The active layer data include daily soil temperature and soil volumetric water content at five different depths. The permafrost data consist of the ground temperature at 20 different depths up to 28.4 m. The high-quality and long-term datasets are expected to serve as accurate forcing data in land surface models and evaluate remote-sensing products for a broader geoscientific community. The datasets are available from the National Tibetan Plateau/Third Pole Environment Data Center (https://doi.org/10.11888/Cryos.tpdc.271838, Wu and Xie, 2021).

Automated summary

Relict permafrost is an ideal site to study the impacts of climate warming on ground thermal regimes, with long-term observations of meteorological and soil data at the Mahan Mountain site providing valuable insights. The high-quality datasets from this study can serve as accurate forcing data in land surface models and contribute to validating remote-sensing products for the geoscientific community.