Estimated future permafrost change: 1960-90 mean

Unit: Fraction of permafrost in grid cell

Permafrost, which covers 15 million km2 of the land surface, is one of the components of the Earth system that is most sensitive to warming. Loss of permafrost would radically change high-latitude hydrology and biogeochemical cycling, and could therefore provide very significant feedbacks on climate change. The latest climate models all predict warming of high-latitude soils and thus thawing of permafrost under future climate change, but with widely varying magnitudes of permafrost thaw. A globally applicable relationship between air temperature and permafrost areal fraction was derived using reanalysis air temperatures and the historical IPA permafrost map. This relationship defines a maximum, minimum and mean permafrost fraction at a given air temperature. Future air temperatures were estimated for a particular global mean warming, using the observed Arctic amplification and a pattern scaling. Here we show the estimated permafrost map, using our method, from the time of the IPA map ('historical' = 1960-1990), along with the estimated future permafrost maps using pattern-scaled air temperatures, for a range of global stabilisation temperatures (between 1 and 6 degree C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900)). For each global mean air temperature there is a maximum, minimum and mean permafrost extent according to our permafrost-air temperature relationships.

Source (citation): Chadburn, Sarah; Burke, Eleanor J; Cox, Peter; Friedlingstein, Pierre; Hugelius, Gustaf; Westermann, Sebastian (2017): Estimated future permafrost maps constrained by observed relationships, with link to model result files in NetCDF format. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.873192 [https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.873192]

License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported