Variability in river temperature, discharge, and energy flux from the Russian panâ€Arctic landmass

• Main Authors: Lammers, Richard B., Pundsack, Jonathan W., Shiklomanov, Alexander I.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository 2007
• Subjects: river temperature; Russia; panâ€Arctic; energy flux; river discharge; Arctic Ocean
• Online Access: https://scholars.unh.edu/faculty_pubs/135; https://doi.org/10.1029/2006JG000370; https://scholars.unh.edu/context/faculty_pubs/article/1134/viewcontent/Lammers_et_al_2007_Journal_of_Geophysical_Research3A_Biogeosciences_282005_201229.pdf

We introduce a new Arctic river temperature data set covering 20 gauges in 17 unique Arctic Ocean drainage basins in the Russian panâ€Arctic (ARTâ€Russia). Warm season 10â€day time step data (decades) were collected from Russian archival sources covering a period from 1929 to 2003 with most data falling in the range from the midâ€1930s to the early 1990s. The water temperature data were combined with river discharge data to estimate energy flux for all basins and over the Russian panâ€Arctic as a whole. Tests for trend were carried out for water temperature, river discharge, and energy flux. Spatially coherent significant increases in the maximum decadal river temperature were found in the European part of the Russian panâ€Arctic. Several other drainage basins showed significant changes, but there was no strong pattern either in the connections between variables or spatially. The trend in area averaged energy flux for the three largest drainage basins (Ob, Yenisey, Lena) combined was found to be significantly decreasing. We speculate that in the Yenisey basin, this decrease was due to large impoundments of river water. The lack of consistency between temperature and energy flux trends was due to the difference in timing between peaks in river temperature and river discharge. The mean area averaged energy flux from the Russian basins was 0.2 W m−2. Using this mean we estimated the total energy flux from the entire Russian panâ€Arctic, both gauged and ungauged, to be 82 EJ a−1.