Circumpolar raster grids of permafrost extent and geohazard potential for near-future climate scenarios

• Main Authors: Karjalainen, Olli, Aalto, Juha, Luoto, Miska, Westermann, Sebastian, Romanovsky, Vladimir E, Nelson, Frederick E, Etzelmüller, Bernd, Hjort, Jan
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2018
• Subjects: File content; File format; File name; File size; Uniform resource locator/link to file; Arctic; permafrost; Thermokarst
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.893881; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.893881

One of the consequences of warming climate is rising ground temperatures and degradation of perennially frozen ground, permafrost. Thawing of near-surface permafrost can cause geohazards, such as ground subsidence, thaw settlement and thermokarst, potentially harmful to nature and human activity in the Arctic. This dataset contains high-resolution raster grids of near-future permafrost extent and geohazard potential for the Northern Hemisphere permafrost areas. Ground temperature was predicted with statistical models employing geospatial data on environmental conditions at 30 arc-second resolution (~1 km2). These predictions, together with data on factors affecting permafrost stability, were used to formulate geohazard indices. Using climate-forcing scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways 2.6, 4.5 and 8.5), permafrost extent and hazard potential were projected for the 2041–2060 and 2061–2080 time periods. The resulting dataset consists of seven permafrost (extent during 2000–2014 and the six future scenarios) and 24 geohazard maps in GeoTIFF format.