A 40-year High Arctic climatological dataset of the Polish Polar Station Hornsund (SW Spitsbergen, Svalbard)

The article presents the climatological dataset from the Polish Polar Station Hornsund located in the southwest part of Spitsbergen – the biggest island of the Svalbard archipelago. Due to a general lack of long-term in situ measurements and observations, the High Arctic remains one of the largest c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Earth System Science Data
Main Authors: T. Wawrzyniak, M. Osuch
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Copernicus Publications 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-805-2020
https://doaj.org/article/45a772246c7e40f9ba3a3651ccfe7790
Description
Summary:The article presents the climatological dataset from the Polish Polar Station Hornsund located in the southwest part of Spitsbergen – the biggest island of the Svalbard archipelago. Due to a general lack of long-term in situ measurements and observations, the High Arctic remains one of the largest climate-data-deficient regions on the Earth. Therefore, the described time series of observations in this paper are of unique value. To draw conclusions on the climatic changes in the Arctic, it is necessary to analyse and compare the long-term series of continuous, in situ observations from different locations, rather than relying on the climatic simulations only. In recent decades, rapid environmental changes occurring in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic are reflected in the data series collected by the operational monitoring conducted at the Hornsund station. We demonstrate the results of the 40-year-long series of observations. Climatological mean values or totals are given, and we also examined the variability of meteorological variables at monthly and annual scale using the modified Mann–Kendall test for trend and Sen's method. The relevant daily, monthly, and annual data are provided on the PANGAEA repository ( https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.909042 , Wawrzyniak and Osuch, 2019).