CONTROL ID: 1489549

TITLE: Active layer and permafrost thermal regimes in ice wedge polygon dominated regions of Alaska

AUTHORS (FIRST NAME, LAST NAME): Jitendra Kumar¹, Gautam Bisht², Satish Karra³, Anna K Liljedahl⁴, Forrest M Hoffman⁵, Richard T Mills⁵, Scott Painter³, Peter E Thornton¹

INSTITUTIONS (ALL): 1. Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, United States.
2. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States.
3. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, United States.
4. University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, United States.
5. Computer Science and Mathematics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, United States.

ABSTRACT BODY: Large areas of Alaskan Arctic tundra are covered by the patterned ground features created by repeated freezing and thawing of soil underlain by aerially continuous permafrost. Polygonal ground structures play an important role in controlling the surface-subsurface hydrology and thermal regimes of this dynamic landscape. Micro-topographic variations in these polygonal feature-dominated areas drive the surface-subsurface hydrologic flows which, in turn, have a strong influence on the subsurface thermal hydrology. Advective heat transport by surface flows and lateral movement of groundwater in the subsurface leads to complex heterogeneous subsurface thermal regimes. Differential heat transport mediated by lateral flows in the subsurface often leads to connectivity among the otherwise isolated polygons, thus changing the local scale hydrology in these systems. We investigate the soil thermal regimes and their control on local scale hydrology in areas of patterned ground using conceptual models and for sites near Barrow, Alaska, through simulations at sub-meter scale resolution for low-centered, high-centered and transition polygons. We also study the thermal and hydrologic characteristics of low- and high-centered polygons and develop schemes for representation, parameterization and scaling in the control of these localized processes for the larger landscape. We achieve this through characterization of the patterned ground using high resolution LiDAR and high fidelity simulations at various scales and resolutions combined with the coupled multiscale-multiphase-multicomponent surface-subsurface reactive flow and transport model PFLOTRAN.

KEYWORDS: [0475] BIOGEOSCIENCES / Permafrost, cryosphere, and high-latitude processes, [1805] HYDROLOGY / Computational hydrology, [0774] CRYOSPHERE / Dynamics, [0768] CRYOSPHERE / Thermal regime.
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CONTACT (NAME ONLY): Jitendra Kumar
CONTACT (E-MAIL ONLY): jkumar at climatemodeling dot org
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