ESA DUE Permafrost: A Circumpolar Remote Sensing Service for Permafrost Evaluation and Application Case Studies
Heim, Birgit¹; Bartsch, Annett²; Rinke, Annette¹; Elger, Kirsten¹; Matthes, Heidrun¹; Klehmet, Katharina³; Rockel, Burkhardt³; Duguay, Claude⁴; Soliman, Aiman⁴; Muster, Sina¹; Buchhorn, Marcel¹; Langer, Moritz¹; Boike, Julia¹; Lantuit, Hugues¹; Seifert, Frank Martin^5
1Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, GERMANY; ²Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Vienna University of Technology, AUSTRIA; ³HZG Helmholtz Research Centre Geesthacht, GERMANY; ⁴Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, CANADA; ⁵European Space Agency, ESA, ITALY

The objective of the ESA Data User Element DUE Permafrost project was to establish a Remote Sensing Service for permafrost applications. Permafrost has been addressed as one of the Essential Climate Variables (ECV’s) in the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). Permafrost is a subground phenomenon but Earth Observation can provide permafrost-related indicators and geophysical parameters used in modelling and monitoring. Climate and permafrost modelers as well as field investigators are associated users including the International Permafrost Association (IPA).
The DUE Permafrost remote sensing products provide land temperature, soil moisture, frozen/thawed surface status, terrain parameters, land cover, and surface waters. The primary programme providing various ground data for the evaluation is the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) initiated by the International Permafrost Association (IPA). The involvement of scientific stakeholders and the IPA, and the ongoing evaluation of the remote sensing derived products make the DUE Permafrost products accepted by the scientific community.
The Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM (Regionale KlimaAnderungen/Regional climate change) is a climate research program where regional observations and process studies are coupled with model simulations
(http://www.reklim.de/en/home/). The ESA DUE Permafrost User workshops initiated the use of the DUE time series within the REKLIM framework for inter-comparison experiments in order to assist the evaluation of calculated parameter fields of models. Within the REKLIM framework we spatio-temporally compare the geophysical surface parameters simulated by regional climate models with the spatio-temporal variability of Earth Observational products. We show inter-comparison substudies on simulated fields of surface temperature and ground frozen, non-frozen state simulated by the regional climate models HIRHAM for the circumpolar domain and COSMO-CLM for Central Siberia.