Snow, soil and meteorological data at Bylot Island for simulating the permafrost thermal regime and evaluating output of the SURFEXv8 land surface scheme

Global warming projections still suffer from a limited representation of the permafrost-carbon feedback. Predicting the response of the permafrost temperature to climate changes requires accurate simulations of the Arctic snow and soil properties. The purpose of this project is to assess the capacity of the coupled models ISBA-Crocus and ISBA-ES to simulate snow and soil properties at Bylot Island, a high Arctic site (Barrere et al., 2017).

The datasets in this issue of Nordicana D are field measurements complemented with ERA-interim reanalyses (Dee et al., 2011), used to drive the models and to evaluate simulation outputs. The measurement site is part of the stations network of the Center for Northern Studies (CEN, 2016). Meteorological data used as driving input cover the period from 1979-2015 with a 3h timestep. The following variables are includes in the netCDF file: air temperature and specific humidity, wind speed, incoming shortwave and longwave radiation, precipitation rate (solid and liquid) and atmospheric pressure.

Evaluation data are available from 2013 to 2015, they include measurements of: snow height (daily values), snow and surface temperatures (one value every two days), soil thermal conductivity (one value every two days), and soil temperature and water content (hourly values).