The fate of deep permafrost carbon in northern high latitudes in the 21st century: a process-based modeling analysis

This dataset composes the results of a process-based model (the terrestrial ecosystem model, TEM) that simulated carbon exchange in the northern high latitudes and focused on the effects of permafrost degradation on ecosystem budget.To investigate the effects of key factors including permafrost degradation, evaluating atmosphere CO2 concentration, changing temperature and precipitation, as well as their interactions on carbon sequestration in the permafrost areas, factorial runs were conducted. For each factor (or each pair of factors), a referenced simulation was carried out, in which the interested factor (or factor pair) was kept at the 2015 value for the entire 2015–2100 period, and the other factors remained unchanged as their original future scenario. Apart from the referenced simulations, a transient simulation was also conducted, in which all the factors were kept as their original future scenario data. The effects of an individual factor (or factor pair) on the simulation results can then be approximated by subtracting the results of the corresponding referenced simulation from the transient simulation. All the transient and referenced simulations were conducted under SSP126 and SSP585 for the 21st century. Therefore, there were 20 simulations in total. The variable names in the dataset, ‘constALT’, ‘constCO2’, ‘constPrec’, and ‘constTair’, denote referenced simulations with constant active layer depth, constant atmosphere CO2 concentration, constant precipitation, and constant air temperature during 2015–2100, respectively. ‘Trans’ denotes the transient simulation. ‘constALTCO2’, ‘constALTPrec’, ‘constCO2Prec’, ‘constCO2Tair’, and ‘constPrecTair’ denote the interactions between factors. ‘Delta’ before variable names means the differences between the transient and referenced simulations.Variable names of ‘ltrc’, ‘npp’, ‘rh’, ‘rh-pf’, ‘soilorgc’, ‘soc-pf’, ‘vegc’, ‘nmin’, ‘son’, ‘vnup’, ‘EcoC’, and ‘SOC_net’ denote litter carbon, net primary production, heterotrophic respiration, heterotrophic respiration from thawed permafrost, soil organic carbon, soil organic carbon from thawed permafrost, vegetation carbon, net nitrogen mineralization, soil organic nitrogen, vegetation nitrogen uptake, ecosystem carbon stock, and the total change of soil organic stock in active layer and permafrost, respectively.The ‘.mat’ files are carbon and nitrogen fluxes along soil depth. Each file is a 3-D matrix, with the first dimension (rows) being years from 2015 to 2100, the second dimension (columns) being soil depth, and the third dimension being simulations from 'trans' to 'constALT', 'constALTCO2', 'cosntALTPrec', 'constCO2', 'cosntCO2Prec', 'constCO2Tair', 'constPrec', 'constPrecTair', and 'constTair', respectively.