ABoVE Project: Arctic-Boreal CO2 and CH4 Flux Synthesis, 1984-2024

NASA's Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) provides a synthesis of terrestrial and freshwater CO2 and CH4 fluxes from the Arctic-Boreal region. The ABCFlux v2 dataset aggregates measurements from 1,028 unique sites to monthly timesteps, spanning 1984-2024. It includes net ecosystem exchange, gross primary production, and ecosystem respiration alongside supporting environmental variables.

Use Cases

• Modeling carbon budgets based on net ecosystem exchange (NEE), gross primary production (GPP), and ecosystem respiration (Reco) data.
• Analyzing methane emission pathways based on diffusive and ebullitive CH4 flux data from aquatic ecosystems.
• Studying the impact of environmental drivers like permafrost thaw status and soil temperature on greenhouse gas fluxes.
• Calibrating remote sensing products using ground-based flux measurements and airborne lidar data.

Strengths

• Includes 1,028 unique measurement sites, providing broad spatial coverage.
• Spans a 40-year temporal range from 1984 to 2024.
• Contains multiple flux types (CO2 and CH4) and supporting environmental variables like permafrost status.
• Integrates data from diverse measurement methods including eddy covariance and chamber techniques.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific modeling tasks.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias, with the majority of observations occurring after 1999.

Provenance

Source

NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE)

Collection Method

Field-based process-level studies linked with airborne and satellite remote sensing data.

Time Range

1984-2024

Freshness

Data spans up to 2024, but the last update date for the dataset itself is unknown.

Geography

Arctic-Boreal region, including Alaska and Western Canada