International Polar Year 2007–2008 - WMO

the majority of the observations performed during
IPY. For the Northern Hemisphere, U.S.A., Canadian,
Norwegian, Swedish, Russian and European agencies
made substantial funding contributions. Several nations
took on leadership in several of the IPY permafrost
cluster projects. Norway took on a prominent
role in temperature and periglacial observations and
national database development in Norway, Svalbard
and Iceland. Germany coordinated coastal permafrost
observations and the drilling of several deep holes in
Russia. Sweden played an important role in coordinating
research on permafrost carbon pools. Portugal
and Spain contributed with great enthusiasm to permafrost
research with their projects in Antarctica and
their outreach efforts strengthened the overall polar
research of those two nations.
IPY provided a unique opportunity to build on
existing permafrost and periglacial research in the
Antarctic, with development of new sites and mapping
efforts. Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Italy, New Zealand,
Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, U.K.
and U.S.A. continued or expanded their activities. The
10-year European PACE project data were reviewed
(Harris et al., 2009). In non-polar regions European
countries continued the PERMOS (Vonder Mühll
et al., 2008) network in Switzerland. In Asia, China,
Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Japan continued on-going
and developed new permafrost observations (see
below). Most participating countries provided funding
through national projects.
The establishment of the permafrost thermal
snapshot in the TSP project primarily confirms large
differences between marine and continental regions,
and between bedrock and sedimentary sites, lowlands
and mountains mainly in the Northern Hemisphere
(Smith et al., 2010; Romanovsky et al., 2010 a,b; and
Christiansen et al., 2010). Temperature trends from
pre-IPY existing boreholes allow us to conclude that
the evolution of the permafrost temperatures is
spatially variable and that the warming of the upper
permafrost differs in magnitude from region to region,
as well as between bedrock and sedimentary regions
according to the Northern Hemisphere TSP research.
This highlights the need for continued acquisition of
a baseline dataset such as the one developed by the
TSP, but also for integration with climate monitoring
and for sustained observations over many decades.
The Carbon Pools in Permafrost (CAPP) project
Fig. 2.7-2. The Arctic
coastal zone depicted
as the climatesensitive
region of
the Arctic in which
human activity
and current rapid
change intersect.
Observatories in
the coastal zone
offer the potential
for combined
multidisciplinary
work in a socioeconomically
relevant
milieu.
(Graphic courtesy of the
Arctic Centre, University of
Groningen, Netherlands)
s C I e n C e P r o g r a m 257