Hydrological regime in a model High Arctic catchment (Bratteggdalen, Svalbard) under warming and precipitation rise

Climate change is impacting water flow worldwide and is particularly important for High Arctic basins. Thawing permafrost and melting of glaciers, as well as higher air temperatures and precipitation, affect hydrological regimes and retention in polar basins. However, knowledge is limited as regards...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Stachnik, Lukasz, Migała, Krzysztof, Wąsik, Mirosław, Marszałek, Henryk, Wołoszyn, Aleksandra, Kasprzak, Marek, Łepkowska, Elżbieta, Pilguj, Natalia, Ignatiuk, Dariusz, Zielonka, Anna, Bartosiewicz, Maciej
Format: Other/Unknown Material
Language:English
Published: Zenodo 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10935540
Description
Summary:Climate change is impacting water flow worldwide and is particularly important for High Arctic basins. Thawing permafrost and melting of glaciers, as well as higher air temperatures and precipitation, affect hydrological regimes and retention in polar basins. However, knowledge is limited as regards long-term changes in discharge from catchments in the High Arctic. Our aim was to evaluate the impact of local conditions on hydrological regime in glacial-fluvio-lacustrine model system in the High Arctic. We used mainly hydrological and meteorological data from 9 summer seasons (June-September) between 2005 and 2019 extracted from the entire database (16 seasons in 1972-2019). Wide range of statistical methods was applied including bootstrapping, random forest and multiple regression, to determine the coupling between hydrometeorological parameters (air and water temperature, discharge, sunshine duration, precipitation). The hydrological regime exhibits a distinct seasonal pattern with a pronounced, snowmelt-derived peak (maximum discharge) in the early part of the season (June-July) affected by precipitation. In the late part of the season (August-September), low-intermediate discharge is primarily governed by air temperatures and, only secondarily by precipitation. The hydrometeorological coupling in August-September is stronger that in June-July. The statistically significant increase in air temperature (0.45°C per decade) in August-September during 1979-2018 makes this part of the season important in terms of long-term changes in the permafrost-underlain catchment. Thawing of the permafrost active layer thaw is clearly reflected by air–temperature-dependent low-to-intermediate discharge. Database consists of following data obtained from long-term discharge analyses: daily discharge data at the gauging station from 1983-2019 (1983-2019 _Brattegg_River_Discharge_v1.csv ), daily water stage data from 1972-1983 (1972-1983 _ Brattegg_River_Water_Stage_v1.csv ), daily water level at gauging station and outflow from ...