Climate change reduces winter overland travel across the Pan-Arctic even under low-end global warming scenarios ...

• Main Authors: Gädeke, Anne, Langer, Moritz, Boike, Julia, Burke, Eleanor J., Chang, Jinfeng, Head, Melissa, Reyer, Christopher P.O., Schaphoff, Sibyll, Thiery, Wim, Thonicke, Kirsten
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: ETH Zurich 2021
• Subjects: permafrost; climate change; land surface models; Arctic transport; winter roads; ice roads; Arctic accessibility; Arctic; Arkhangelsk; Climate change; Global warming; Ice; nenets; Sakha; Yakutia; Alaska; Arkhangelsk Oblast; Siberia
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000471295; http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/471295

Amplified climate warming has led to permafrost degradation and a shortening of the winter season, both impacting cost-effective overland travel across the Arctic. Here we use, for the first time, four state-of-the-art Land Surface Models that explicitly consider ground freezing states, forced by a subset of bias-adjusted CMIP5 General Circulation Models to estimate the impact of different global warming scenarios (RCP2.6, 6.0, 8.5) on two modes of winter travel: overland travel days (OTDs) and ice road construction days (IRCDs). We show that OTDs decrease by on average −13% in the near future (2021–2050) and between −15% (RCP2.6) and −40% (RCP8.5) in the far future (2070–2099) compared to the reference period (1971–2000) when 173 d yr−1 are simulated across the Pan-Arctic. Regionally, we identified Eastern Siberia (Sakha (Yakutia), Khabarovsk Krai, Magadan Oblast) to be most resilient to climate change, while Alaska (USA), the Northwestern Russian regions (Yamalo, Arkhangelsk Oblast, Nenets, Komi, ... : Environmental Research Letters, 16 (2) ...