A Comprehensive Dataset for Earth System Models in a Permafrost Region: Meteorological, Permafrost, and Carbon Observations (2011–2020) in Northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Abstract. It’s important to understand the role of permafrost in the future climate and water resources management, for huge storage of soil organic carbon and ground ice in the permafrost. To date, large uncertainties still exist in permafrost simulations for many reasons. One reason is being a lack of long-term meteorological, permafrost and carbon observations. Here, we therefore present datasets for air temperatures, precipitation, soil temperature and moisture, active layer thickness, ground temperatures at different depths, soil organic carbon contents, and ecosystem carbon emission rates for the Qilian Mountains of the Northeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau during 2011–2020. The data come from 5 automatic meteorological stations, 21 boreholes with depths from 11.5 to 149.3 m, and 12 active layer monitoring sites, which are used to obtain the hydrothermal and thermal states, and climate change in the study area. Soil organic carbon contents is available from 10 deep boreholes, down to a depth of 20 m. Ecosystem respiration rates are obtained from the prevalent vegetation types of alpine wet meadow, meadow, and steppe for the growing seasons. This decade’s high-quality datasets are expected to serve as useful inputs for earth system models, and are for researchers working in those disciplines including geophysics, ecology, and hydrology in alpine environments. The datasets are available from the National Tibetan Plateau/Third Pole Environment Data Center and can be downloaded from http://dx.doi.org/10.11888/Cryos.tpdc.272840 (Mu and Peng, 2022).