Estimation of permafrost on the Tibetan Plateau under current and future climate conditions using the CMIP5 data

Permafrost has significant impacts on climate change through its strong interaction with the climate system. In order to better understand the permafrost variation and the role it plays in climate change, model outputs from Phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) are used in the present study to diagnose the near‐surface permafrost on the Tibetan Plateau (TP), assess the abilities of the models to simulate present‐day (1986–2005) permafrost and project future permafrost change on the TP under four different representative concentration pathways (RCPs). The results indicate that estimations of present‐day permafrost using the surface frost index (SFI) and the Kudryavtsev method (KUD) show a spatial distribution similar to that of the frozen soil map on the TP. However, the permafrost area calculated via the KUD is larger than that calculated via the SFI. The SFI produces a present‐day permafrost area of 127.2 × 104 km2. The results also indicate that the permafrost on the TP will undergo regional degradation, mainly at the eastern, southern and northeastern edges, during the 21st century. Furthermore, most of the sustainable permafrost will probably exist only in the northwestern TP by 2099. The SFI also indicates that the permafrost area will shrink by 13.3 × 104 km2 (9.7%) and 14.6 × 104 km2 (10.5%) under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios, respectively, in the next 20 years and by 36.7 × 104 km2 (26.6%) and 45.7 × 104 km2 (32.7%), respectively, in the next 50 years. The results are helpful for us to better understand the permafrost response to climate change over the TP, further investigate the physical mechanism of the freeze–thaw process and improve the model parameterization scheme. Projections of the changes in permafrost area on the TP under RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5 via (a) SFI and (b) KUD. Shaded areas show the SDs across the CMIP5 models, and the black lines show the equivalent present‐day area.