Observations and geophysical value-added datasets for cold high mountain and polar regions

The Earth’s cold regions, in particular, the Arctic, Antarctic, and High-Mountain Asia (HMA), are dominated by the changing cryosphere and have inherently fragile environments (Guo, 2018; Kulmala, 2018; Guo et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020; Yao et al., 2022; Group on Earth Observations (GEO), 2022). Warming has reshaped the regions where the cryosphere is located; it has also been affecting water availability in lowland downstream areas, opening up northern sea routes, and affecting the stability of roads and infrastructure in permafrost rich areas (Pulliainen et al., 2019). Changes in the phase of water and its consequences have thus had a major impact on the environment and the lives of billions of people.

Timely and accurate information on the elements that comprise the cryosphere, including snow, glaciers, permafrost, freshwater ice, sea ice, and solid precipitation, provide the data-evidenced support to the protection of these cold regions’ fragile ecosystems and environment, facilitating the sustainable exploitation of environmental resources, providing driven data for hydrometeorological model, and supporting the safe use of infrastructure over land and ocean (Pulliainen et al., 2019; Guo et al., 2020). The availability of data and information thus helps with the achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) (Hu et al., 2017; Qiu et al., 2016; Qiu et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2021; Zhao et al., 2021; GEO, 2022).

Awareness of the open sharing and interoperability of Earth observations and value-added datasets has been promoted by international programs and projects; for example, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the GEO Cold Regions Initiative (Qiu et al., 2016; Pirazzini et al., 2020; GEO, 2022), and the Pan-Eurasian Experiment program (Lappalainen et al., 2022), as well as environmental projects concerned with polar regions, such as the Integrated Arctic Observation System (INTAROS), which is part of the EU’s Horizon 2020 project (Sandven et al., 2020), and its counterpart project Multi-Parameters Arctic Environmental Observations and Information Services funded by Ministry of Science and Technology of China (MARIS); the ERA-PLANET Strand-4 Integrative and Comprehensive Understanding on Polar Environments project (iCUPE) (Petäjä et al., 2020); the CASEarth Poles project (Li et al., 2020), which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Big Earth Data Science Engineering Program (Guo, 2018); the Digital Belt and Road Program Working Group on High Mountain and Cold Regions (Qiu et al., 2017); and the Third Pole Environment (Yao et al., 2012; Yao et al., 2022).

Many recent developments have been concerned with the rich deliverables of data gathered continuously by the increasing number of national and international Earth observation systems to the public. However, the opening up of datasets is posing challenges for the study of the Earth’s cold regions. In particular, the lack of the efficient data stream services is needed to address emergency challenges, Earth science research, and UN SDGs (Guo, 2018).

This special issue includes eight papers. Five of these are concerned with open value-added datasets on snow (Jiang et al., 2022), lake ice (Wang et al., 2021), glaciers (Lhakpa et al., 2022), sea ice (Zhao et al., 2021), and heat fluxes (Duan et al., 2022), respectively, and two others are about the applications based on the in situ and value-added data from remote sensing (Wu et al., 2021; Chalov et al., 2022). In another study (Liang et al., 2021), Big Earth Data is successfully used to study the melting of Antarctic ice based on cloud computing; the original EW mode dataset was open in this issue for further development. These papers cover research in the Arctic (Chalov et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2021), Antarctic (Liang et al., 2021; Zhao et al., 2021), and HMA (Duan et al., 2022; Jiang et al., 2022; Lhakpa et al., 2022). Five of the studies are based on series of remote sensing data covering several decades; three are based on in situ measurements and modeling. The snow, Tibetan Plateau heat flux, and lake ice data products are available for free download online. For the first time, advice for shipping using the Northern Sea Route is released (Wu et al., 2021).

All the data and applications complement existing knowledge about the Earth’s cold high mountain and polar regions; follow up these efforts on open data and the forthcoming efforts, GEO Cold Regions Initiative (GEOCRI, www.geocri.org) will strengthen international open data stream using novel methods for the next three years (GEO, 2022).

Acknowledgements

The work was supported by Chinese National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2019YFE0105700) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDA19070201 and No. XDA19070102). We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who helped to make this special issue possible, including the authors and anonymous reviewers. Special thanks go to the Executive Editor-in-Chief Prof. Changlin Wang and Assistant Editor Dr. Linlin Guan from the Editorial Office for their assistance.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created.