Understanding permafrost processes and changes requires long-term observational datasets of ground and climate variables. Despite the fact that the Arctic climate changes more rapidly than the rest of the globe, observational data density in the region is low and most time series are short. Long term observations are available from the Bayelva Site at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, where meteorology, energy balance components and subsurface observations have been made since 1998 and are still continued today. The climate observations include snow depth, snow dielectric number, snow temperature, liquid precipitation, air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, and radiation fluxes. The below-ground observations cover active layer and permafrost temperature, soil volumetric water content and soil bulk electrical conductivity. Since the data provide observations of temporally variable parameters that mitigate energy fluxes between permafrost and atmosphere, such as snow depth and soil moisture content, they are suitable for use in integrating, calibrating and testing permafrost as a component in Earth System Models. The resulting quality-controlled dataset is unique in the Arctic and serves as a baseline for future studies.

PLEASE NOTE If you use these datasets, please cite the publication given in "References".--When clicking on "Download ZIP file containing all datasets" you will only download meteorological data. The soil data needs to be downloaded seperately, download links are available in the zip in file "summary.txt".