Observed data and simulations results from Disko Island for thermal-hydrological investigations

The dataset contains measurements from a sloped field site, underlain by permafrost in Disko Island, Greenland (69°27' N, 53°46' W), and model outputs produced with the Advanced terrestrial simulator (Coon et al. 2019), simulating water flow along a slope at the same location. Both field data and model output are used to prepare the research article 'Impact of summer temperature on water flow and transport on a permafrost-affected slope in West Greenland' to be published in Water Resources Research.

Field data collected during August 2015 includes measurements of the active layer thickness conducted with an active layer probe and water levels collected using manually monitored piezometers to enable the description of the thermal-hydrological conditions. To investigate solute movement and to verify model results, two tracer experiment using NaCl were conducted in August 2015, and spatial distribution of the tracer was monitored at four dates using a conductivity meter (Hanna Instruments, HI99300). A topographic model of the field site was acquired using a d-GPS (Trimble RTK-R8 DGPS). The parameters soil temperature, soil water content and electric conductivity are collected at 14 locations along the slope with Decagon Devices 5TE sensors for the time period from August 2015 until August 2021 and are subsequently used to validate the simulations. Additionally validated simulations using the SnowModel (Liston & Elder, 2006) of snow depth measurements of the field site for the years 2014 until 2020 are used to validate the model.

Data collected at the field site is subsequently used in the Advanced terrestrial simulator to simulate the thermal-hydrological state of the soil and the water balance of the slope in two dimensions. The model work is split in two parts: An initial run simulating the period 2000-2020 that was used for validating the model against field observations collected between August 2015 and August 2021, and three model runs that simulate each one year with different scenarios of warm/average/cold summers. All model output files contain 257 parameters in daily timesteps.