Impact of frozen soil processes on soil thermal characteristics at seasonal to decadal scales over the Tibetan Plateau and North China

Li, Qian; Xue, Yongkang; Liu, Ye

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-2089-2021

Articles | Volume 25, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-2089-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-2089-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 25, issue 4

Research article

|

20 Apr 2021

Research article |

| 20 Apr 2021

Impact of frozen soil processes on soil thermal characteristics at seasonal to decadal scales over the Tibetan Plateau and North China

Qian Li, Yongkang Xue, and Ye Liu

Data sets

A global monthly land surface air temperature analysis for 1948-present (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ghcncams.html) Y. Fan and H. van den Dool https://doi.org/10.1029/2007jd008470

Development of a 50-year high-resolution global dataset of meteorological forcings for land 50 surface modeling (http://hydrology.princeton.edu/data.php) J. Sheffield, G. Goteti, and E. F. Wood https://doi.org/10.1175/jcli3790.1

Dataset of monthly surface climatological data (1951-present) from 613 stations in China China Meteorological Administration https://data.cma.cn/data/cdcdetail/dataCode/SURF_CLI_CHN_MUL_MON.html

Short summary

Most land surface models have difficulty in capturing the freeze–thaw cycle in the Tibetan Plateau and North China. This paper introduces a physically more realistic and efficient frozen soil module (FSM) into the SSiB3 model (SSiB3-FSM). A new and more stable semi-implicit scheme and a physics-based freezing–thawing scheme were applied, and results show that SSiB3-FSM can be used as an effective model for soil thermal characteristics at seasonal to decadal scales over frozen ground.