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

作者：Tao Che, Xin Li, Shaomin Liu, Hongyi Li, Ziwei Xu, Junlei Tan, Yang Zhang, Zhiguo Ren, Lin Xiao, Jie Deng, Rui Jin, Mingguo Ma, Jian Wang, Xiaofan Yang · 发表于：Earth system science data · 年份：2019 · DOI：10.5194/essd-11-1483-2019 · 被引用次数：190 · 研究领域：Cryospheric studies and observations、Climate change and permafrost、Soil Moisture and Remote Sensing

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 ob...