Sustainable earth observations for the Arctic, the Antarctic and the high-altitude mountain cold regions

The Arctic, the Antarctic as well as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) are cold regions on Earth where snow and ice dominate the local environment and impact the global climate via several strong feedback mechanisms. The observations and information service for those cold regions are vital for the societal benefits, and support from the science to policy making (Qiu et al. 2016). Earth cold regions exhibit strong sensitivity to global climate change and are thus some of the most fragile regions in terms of global ecology (Pulliainen et al. 2017). Due to these inherent similarities, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau area has been termed as the ‘Third Pole’, which is experiencing profound environmental changes.

Recent research has provided evidence that the emergence of rapid Arctic warming in recent decades has coincided with unusually cold winters over Northern Hemisphere continents. The high latitude cold regions, especially the Arctic ocean, have a profound influence on northern hemisphere weather and climate, which further extends to provide a global impact. The high-altitude mountain Cold Regions, in particular, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, contribute to climate change through the water and energy cycle and other modulating mechanisms. Improving the understanding of the interconnection and teleconnection between high latitude cold regions, especially the Arctic, and high-altitude cold regions is becoming a key challenge (Qiu et al. 2017). From the perspective of the Earth climate system, there is a need for the sustainable observations and development of new methodologies to better characterize the evolution of the cryosphere, ecosystem, and atmosphere.

Current research mainly focuses on a single pole, and comparative study across three poles is lacking. To fully understand the impacts and responses of Three Poles to global change, scientists need to consider Earth’s three poles as a whole, study their spatial–temporal varieties, interconnections and relationships of their environmental parameters. The advantages of using space-based Earth observation for systematic study on the three poles.

While due to the vastness and remoteness of these regions, remote sensing has become increasingly important for understanding the environmental changes and the driven factors by providing regional measurements of key land surface parameters. The integrated observations of environmental change in these cold regions are crucial for understanding the systematic process of global change. Given the amount of available historical Earth Observations (EO) data, as well as the fast evolution of interpretation methods of satellite observations and various numerical modeling approaches, a ‘three poles comparative study’ became feasible for ensuring a better understanding of the changing synchronism and asynchronism the mechanism among Earth poles.

This special theme is devoted to the latest study on earth observations and understanding of the impact to the change of high latitude cold regions and high mountain cold regions, which will provide up-to-date observations of products and models for the sustainable research of cold regions. The issue includes the methodology on retrieval of remote sensing and assimilation with in-situ measurement for cryosphere over Earth poles, and its climatology environmental data products and their changing analysis over Earth poles in the last decades.

Acknowledgements

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all authors, the anonymous reviewers, the editorial board members, and the publishers to make this special issue available. We also thank Dr. Juha Lemmetyinen for his help at the beginning of this special issue. Special thanks go to Prof. Changlin Wang, Executive Editor of the International Journal of Digital Earth (IJDE), and Ms. Zhen Liu of the IJDE Editorial Office for their assistance.