Figure 3.10
Schematic of important land surface components influenced by the Arctic terrestrial cryosphere: permafrost (1); ground ice (2); river discharge (3); abrupt thaw (4); surface water (5); fire (6); tundra (7); shrubs (8); boreal forest (9); lake ice (10); seasonal snow (11). Time series of snow cover extent anomalies in June (relative to 1981–2010 climatology) from 5 products based on the approach of Mudryk et al. (2017) (a); permafrost temperature change normalised to a baseline period (Romanovsky et al., 2017), Region A: Continuous to discontinuous permafrost in Scandanavia, Svalbard, and Russia/Siberia, Region B: Cold continuous permafrost in northern Alaska, Northwest Territories, and NE Siberia, Region C: Cold continuous permafrost in Eastern and High Arctic Canada, Region D: Discontinuous permafrost in Interior Alaska and Northwest Canada (b), and runoff from northern flowing watersheds normalised to a baseline period (1981–2010) (Holmes et al., 2018), multi-station average (± 1 standard deviation) (c). Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) multi-model average (± 1 standard deviation) projections for different Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios for June snow cover extent change (based on Thackeray et al., 2016) (d), area change of near-surface permafrost (e), and runoff change to the Arctic Ocean (based on McGuire et al., 2018) (f).