The rapid warming in the Arctic leads to changes in aquatic ecosystems including Arctic lakes. It is therefore important to monitor lake-physical changes through continued measurements. A project at Lake Tarfala, led by Nina Kirchner, Annika Granebeck and Marnie Hancke, is looking into these changes.

“We use temperature loggers to capture changes in lake temperatures in Lake Tarfala, and have now continuous records since 2016. In 2020, we also placed a time-lapse camera overlooking the lake with the aim to learn about the timing and length of the lakes ice-free period as this influence, among others, mixing processes in the lake. The images will also be used to correlate the timing of ice-on and ice-off at the lake with the water temperatures measured in situ by the temperature loggers. This dataset contains 955 images taken of Lake Tarfala every 2 hours during the summer of 2020,” says Annika Granebeck.

The project was funded by the Bolin Centre and Arctic Avenue.

View the visualization and dataset on the Bolin website

View lake water temperature dataset

Photo: Annika Granebeck