Ground temperature is the most common variable in permafrost monitoring and one of three products used to characterize the permafrost Essential Climate Variable by the World Meteorological Organization.
PermafrostNet’s data scientist, Nicholas Brown, has conducted an investigation into the metrics used to assess indicators of permafrost and heat changes in the ground.
Based on this investigation, recommendations are provided for a set of five metrics that offer a more comprehensive picture of permafrost thaw.
Metrics such as the mean annual ground temperature (MAGT) and active layer thickness (ALT) are used to monitor and quantify permafrost change. However, these have limitations including those arising from the effects of latent heat, which reduce their sensitivity.
The team investigated the behaviour of existing and novel metrics derived from temperature observations (TSP metrics) using an ensemble of more than seventy 120-year simulations. They evaluated which TSP metrics provide new insight into permafrost change and evaluated how reliably each one indicates changes in sensible, latent, and total heat contents for different levels of sensor quality. They also quantified the effect of sensor placement on the magnitude of observed MAGT trends.
Brown, N. and Gruber, S. (2025). Beyond MAGT: learning more from permafrost thermal monitoring data with additional metrics, EGUSphere [preprint], DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-2658
