Integrated hydrometeorological, snow and frozen-ground observations in the alpine region of the Heihe River Basin, China

Abstract

Abstract. The alpine region is important in riverine and watershed ecosystems as a contributor of freshwater, providing and stimulating specific habitats for biodiversity. In parallel, recent climate change, human activities and other perturbations may disturb hydrological processes and eco-functions, creating the need for next-generation observational and modeling approaches to advance a predictive understanding of such processes in the alpine region. However, several formidable challenges, including the cold and harsh climate, high altitude and complex topography, inhibit complete and consistent data collection where and when it is needed, which hinders the development of remote-sensing technologies and alpine hydrological models. The current study presents a suite of datasets consisting of long-term hydrometeorological, snow cover and frozen-ground data for investigating watershed science and functions from an integrated, distributed and multiscale observation network in the upper reaches of the Heihe River Basin (HRB) in China. Meteorological and hydrological data were monitored from an observation network connecting a group of automatic meteorological stations (AMSs). In addition, to capture snow accumulation and ablation processes, snow cover properties were collected from a snow observation superstation using state-of-the-art techniques and instruments. High-resolution soil physics datasets were also obtained to capture the freeze–thaw processes from a frozen-ground observation superstation. The updated datasets were released to scientists with multidisciplinary backgrounds (i.e., cryospheric science, hydrology and meteorology), and they are expected to serve as a testing platform to provide accurate forcing data and validate and evaluate remote-sensing products and hydrological models for a broader community. The datasets are available from the Cold and Arid Regions Science Data Center at Lanzhou (https://doi.org/10.3972/hiwater.001.2019.db, Li, 2019).

Characterizing Surface Albedo of Shallow Fresh Snow and Its Importance for Snow Ablation on the Interior of the Tibetan Plateau

“…We used all data that are accessible, which means that the observation periods are not the same across the stations. These stations include ANNI-AWS (1 October 2002-14 August 2004 hourly), D105 (1 October 2002-28 November 2004, hourly) obtained through CEOP (Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period) Asia-Australia monsoon project (CAMP) on the TP (Koike 2004;Ma et al 2005 (Che et al 2019;Li et al 2019). Their locations are shown in Fig.…”

“…The location of 45 meteorological stations (circles), and the average of the observed 2012-14 Jan snow depth (filled). The shade is the January snow depth averaged through 2012 to 2014 using the microwave satellite data (Che et al 2008). The background is the topography of the Tibetan Plateau represented by the hill shade from SRTM, provided by Geospatial Data Cloud site, Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences.…”

“…Observed meteorological and snow depth data with good quality are expected to meet all of the following requirements: 1) the upward longwave radiation must be less than 315.6 W m 22 , that is, the ground surface temperature cannot be above 08C when snow exists; 2) air temperature must be less than 58C during snowfall, since snowfall can happen on the TP when air temperature is above 08C; 3) measured snow depth should be greater than 1 cm, which is the measurement uncertainty of snow depth; and 4) observed snow depth increases when snowfall is recorded-this requirement was not applied to Tanggula station because precipitation events were not recorded during all the measurement period. Observed snow albedo was calculated as the ratio of upward to downward shortwave radiation following Che et al (2019). To further eliminate the impact of solar angle on albedo, we took averages between 1000 and 1400 local time of albedo, snow depth, air temperature, and precipitation, as the ''daily'' values for the four experimental sites in the statistical analysis.…”

Three-in-one: GPS-IR measurements of ground surface elevation changes, soil moisture, and snow depth at a permafrost site in the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

“…And the soil becomes mainly gravel at the depth of 0.5 m. This general soil texture description was kept when installing the GPS monument. The soil moisture content is ~40% in the upper 0.4 m, decreases to 20% at the depth of 0.8 m, and remains relatively stable to the depth of 1.6 m (Che et al, 2019).…”

Impact of Initialized Land Surface Temperature and Snowpack on Subseasonal to Seasonal Prediction Project, Phase I (LS4P-I): Organization and Experimental design

“…Processes & Environment of China (HORN) which contains the meteorological, hydrological and the ecological datasets (Peng and Zhu, 2017); soil temperature and moisture observations (Su et al, 2011;Yang et al, 2013); multi-scale observations of the Heihe River Basin (Li et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2018;Che et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019); and multiple datasets from the coordinated Asia-European long-term observing system for the Tibetan Plateau (Ma et al, 2009).…”