Arctic permafrost runoff driven by climate change

by Los Alamos National Laboratory

Rising temperatures and changes in precipitation are driving increases to streamflow in areas of high-latitude North America where permafrost dominates the landscape.

“We saw long-term trends of increasing streamflows in the Arctic that reflect how deeper layers of the permafrost are thawing and releasing water,” said Katrina Bennett, a hydrologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of a recent paper on permafrost streamflows in the journal Frontiers in Water. “In general, we found that all areas with at least some permafrost coverage were experiencing higher streamflows overall and higher minimum flows as the Arctic climate warms up.”

Bennett and a team from Los Alamos and the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks analyzed diverse, challenging data sets for hydrology in the permafrost region.

The analysis makes it clear that changes in precipitation…