Differentiation of Drained Lake Basin Types considering river floodplains

The Arctic permafrost is warming widely, and the circumpolar region is heating up four times faster than the global average. Common features of permafrost landscapes are drained lake basins (DLBs) which play an important role for the geomorphological, hydrological and the ecological development of those landscapes. In addition, rivers transport significant amounts of freshwater, dissolved organic carbon, and other materials into the Arctic Ocean. The impact of close-by streams for DLB drainage and refilling events needs to be quantified.

Here, we focus on DLBs and their connections to river floodplains on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia, a region underlain by both discontinuous and continuous permafrost and covered with tundra vegetation, thaw lakes, and wetlands. For this study, we investigated manually selected DLBs using DEM derivatives. The lakes represent a North-South climatic gradient and different drained lake basin development stages. DEM derivatives are also used to represent related small-scale landscape features in climate models. The utility of metrics based on the Copernicus DEM, which were recently implemented in the ICON-Land model, was assessed. Potential floodplain linkage could be identified in many cases, leading also to diverting patterns of landcover evolution after drainage.

The results provide a foundation for further analysis of lakes and their connections to streams, which play a role in the wetting and drying processes and subsequent impacts on the carbon cycle across the Arctic.