Abstract. The Tibetan Plateau (TP) plays a critical role in influencing regional and global climate, via both thermal and dynamical mechanisms. Meanwhile, as the largest high-elevation part of the cryosphere outside the polar regions, with vast areas of mountain glaciers, permafrost and seasonally frozen ground, the TP is characterized as an area sensitive to global climate change. However, meteorological stations are sparely and biased distributed over the TP, owing to the harsh environmental conditions, high elevations, complex topography, and heterogeneous surfaces. Moreover, due to the weak representative of the stations, atmospheric conditions and the local land-atmosphere coupled system over the TP as well as its effects on surrounding regions are poorly quantified. This paper presents a long-term (2005–2016) dataset of hourly land-atmosphere interaction observations from an integrated high-elevation, cold region observation network, which is composed of six field observation and research platforms on the TP. In-situ observations, at the hourly resolution, consisting of measurements of micrometeorology, surface radiation, eddy covariance (EC), and soil temperature and soil water content profiles. Meteorological data were monitored by automatic weather station (AWS) or a planetary boundary layer (PBL) observation system composed of multiple meteorological element instruments. Multilayer soil hydrothermal data were recorded to capture vertical variations in soil temperature and water content and to study the freeze-thaw processes. In addition, to capture the high-frequency vertical exchanges of energy, momentum, water vapor and carbon dioxide within the atmospheric boundary layer, an EC system consisting of an ultrasonic anemometer and an infrared gas analyzer was installed at each station. The release of these continuous and long-term datasets with hourly time resolution represents a leap forward in scientific data sharing over the TP, and it has been partially used in the past to assist in understanding key land surface processes. This dataset is described here comprehensively for facilitating a broader multidisciplinary community by enabling the evaluation and development of existing or new remote sensing algorithms as well as geophysical models for climate research and forecasting. The whole datasets are freely available at Science Data Bank (http://www.dx.doi.org/10.11922/sciencedb.00103, Ma et al., 2020) and, additionally at the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (https://data.tpdc.ac.cn/en/data/b9ab35b2-81fb-4330-925f-4d9860ac47c3/).
Long term variations of actual evapotranspiration over the Tibetan Plateau
