Abstract
As an important component of the cryosphere, the frozen ground is sensitive to climate change. With global warming, frozen ground in most regions of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) is degrading. The Stefan model and the temperature at the top of the permafrost (TTOP) model were adopted to estimate the spatial distribution of frozen ground and maximum soil freezing depth (SFD) based on multiple datasets across the QTP from 2000 to 2020. Results were then evaluated. The objective of this study is to investigate the spatiotemporal patterns of the frozen ground in the QTP in the past 20 years. In the QTP, permafrost mainly distributes in the central and the western regions, covering an area of about 9.69 × 105 km2 and accounting for 39.5% of the total area of QTP. The mean area of seasonally frozen ground was ~ 1.39 × 106 km2, and the mean SFD was ~ 1.28 m. The SFD showed a spatial distribution pattern of being deep in the west and north and shallow in the east and south. In the past 2 decades, permafrost areas in the QTP decreased by about 8.52 × 104 km2. The regions with permafrost disappearing were mainly located in the transition areas from permafrost to seasonally frozen ground. There was an obvious disappearance of permafrost in the Qilian Mountains, the source region of the Yangtze River, and the source region of the Yellow River. The SFD decreased at about 60.82% of the QTP, and the annual average decreasing rate was − 4.3 cm·(10a)−1. Regions with a significant decrease in the SFD were mainly located at the center of the Qaidam Basin in the northern regions and the Western Sichuan Plateau and the Hengduan Mountains in the southwest regions, and their decreasing rate was about − 12 ~ − 5 cm·(10a)−1.
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All datasets used in this study are publicly available and can be accessed from their original creators.
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Funding
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41801099) and the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0307, 2019QZKK0301).
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Bo Wen: conceptualization, methodology, software, investigation, data curation, writing – original draft preparation, writing – review, and editing. Tingbin Zhang: conceptualization, writing – original draft preparation, writing – review and editing, validation, formal analysis, project administration, funding acquisition. Xiaobing Zhou: methodology, resources, writing – review and editing, visualization, supervision. Guihua Yi: methodology, resources, writing – review and editing. Jingji Li: validation, investigation, formal analysis. Xiaojuan Bie: validation, investigation, formal analysis. Yang Chen: software, formal analysis, data curation.
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Wen, B., Zhang, T., Zhou, X. et al. Variation characteristics of frozen ground degradation in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau observed using time series data of MODIS from 2000 to 2020. Theor Appl Climatol 151, 1673–1686 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04344-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04344-6