A new all-year round CO2 fluxes multi-instrumental observatory in the High Arctic Tundra

Poster presented at the ASSW 2025 - ICARP IV Summit in Boulder, Colorado (20-28 March 2025). Abstract: Arctic amplification will bring rapid changes in the tundra carbon cycle, possibly transforming the tundra from a carbon sink into a carbon source. Monitoring the all-year-long CO2 cycle is a challenge, due to the remoteness, the winter weather conditions and the lack of infrastructures. Nevertheless, all-year data are extremely precious, as winter emissions are the “great unknown” of the Arctic carbon cycle (Natali, 2019). As most studies concentrate on the short summer season, it is therefore difficult to provide an accurate tundra carbon budget. We made the most of the facilities offered by the permanent Ny Ålesund research station in the Svalbard Archipelago (NO) to create a multi-instrument all-year round observatory of CO2 fluxes, consisting in an array of instruments that measure CO2 fluxes at different scales, as portable flux chambers, Eddy Covariance and an array of below and above ground CO2 sensors aimed to measure winter CO2 fluxes from the snowpack, particularly aimed to intercept wind-burst emissions, when the Eddy Covariance fails due to the absence of vertical turbulence, all complemented by meteo stations. All data are integrated and made available following the FAIR principles through a web portal that will be available through the Italian Arctic Data Centre, SIOS, the Svalbard Integrated Observing System and a CNR Virtual Research Environment (VRE). We aim to create an open virtual laboratory for modelling arctic CO2 fluxes at multiple scales and to serve as seed for a pan-arctic network of similar observatories, possibly including other observation platforms as airborne remote-sensing.