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Spatiotemporal dynamics of wetted soils across a polar desert landscape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2014

Zachary L. Langford ,
Michael N. Gooseff  and
Derrick J. Lampkin
Zachary L. Langford*
Affiliation:
Computer Science and Mathematics Division and Climate Change Science Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6301, USA Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802-1012, USA
Michael N. Gooseff
Affiliation:
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1372, USA
Derrick J. Lampkin
Affiliation:
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-9821, USA
*
zach@climatemodeling.org
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Abstract

Liquid water is scarce across the landscape of the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDV), Antarctica, a 3800 km2 ice-free region, and is chiefly associated with soils that are adjacent to streams and lakes (i.e. wetted margins) during the annual thaw season. However, isolated wetted soils have been observed at locations distal from water bodies. The source of water for the isolated patches of wet soil is potentially generated by a combination of infiltration from melting snowpacks, melting of pore ice at the ice table, and melting of buried segregation ice formed during winter freezing. High resolution remote sensing data gathered several times per summer in the MDV region were used to determine the spatial and temporal distribution of wet soils. The spatial consistency with which the wet soils occurred was assessed for the 2009–10 to 2011–12 summers. The remote sensing analyses reveal that cumulative area and number of wet soil patches varies among summers. The 2010–11 summer provided the most wetted soil area (10.21 km2) and 2009–10 covered the least (5.38 km2). These data suggest that wet soils are a significant component of the MDV cold desert land system and may become more prevalent as regional climate changes.

Keywords

McMurdo Dry Valleysremote sensingsnowsoil moisturestreamswater tracks
Type
Physical Sciences
Information
Antarctic Science , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 197 - 209
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Copyright
© Antarctic Science Ltd 2014 

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