These data contain historical and future projections of percent land cover from 1950 to 2100, as simulated by the Alaska Thermokarst Model for the boreal region. The data are 1km spatial resolution. The climate data used to drive the model simulations are from the Climate Research Unit, Time Series 4.0 (CRU_TS40) for the historical period (1950 to 2015), and from RCP 8.5 and global circulation models NCAR-CCSM4 and MRI-CGCM3 for the projected period (2016 to 2100). Datasets from the years 1950, 2000, 2050, and 2100 are provided. Annual maps are available upon request. Please note that this data is used to fill in a gap in available data for the Integrated Ecosystem Model (IEM) and does not constitute a complete or precise measurement of this variable in all locations. If used for publication, these data should be cited as the following: Genet H., Lara M., McGuire A.D., Jorgenson T.M., Euskirchen E.S., Clein J., Carman T., Rutter R., Rupp S., Breen A., Kurkowski T., Bennett A., Torgenson B., Romanovski V., Marchenko S. 2018. Land cover dynamic in the Tanana Flats from 1950 to 2100 driven by thermokarst activity.

This dataset consists of 6000 GeoTIFFs produced by the Geophysical Institute Permafrost Lab (GIPL) Permafrost Model. Six distinct CMIP5 model-scenario combinations were used to force the GIPL model output. Each model-scenario combination includes annual (2021-2120) summaries of the following ten variables: - Mean Annual Ground Temperature (MAGT) at 0.5 m below the surface (°C) - MAGT at 1 m below the surface (°C) - MAGT at 2 m below the surface (°C) - MAGT at 3 m below the surface (°C) - MAGT at 4 m below the surface (°C) - MAGT at 5 m below the surface (°C) - Mean Annual Surface (i.e., 0.01 m depth) Temperature (°C) - Permafrost top (upper boundary of the permafrost, depth below the surface in m) - Permafrost base (lower boundary of the permafrost, depth below the surface in m) - Talik thickness (perennially unfrozen ground occurring in permafrost terrain, m) There are 1000 GeoTIFF files per model-scenario combination. The model-scenario combinations are: - GFDL-CM3, RCP 4.5 - GFDL-CM3, RCP 8.5 - NCAR-CCSM4, RCP 4.5 - NCAR-CCSM4, RCP 8.5 - A 5-Model (GFDL-CM3, NCAR-CCSM4, GISS-E2-R, IPSL-CM5A-LR, MRI-CGCM3) Average, RCP 8.5 - A 5-Model (GFDL-CM3, NCAR-CCSM4, GISS-E2-R, IPSL-CM5A-LR, MRI-CGCM3) Average, RCP 4.5 The file naming convention is `gipl_model_scenario_variable_year.tif` for example: `gipl_GFDL-CM3_rcp45_talikthickness_m_2090.tif` Each GeoTIFF uses the Alaska Albers (EPSG:3338) projection and has a spatial resolution of 1 km x 1 km. All rasters in this dataset have indentical extents, spatial references, and metadata objects. Once extracted, the entire dataset (all 6000 GeoTIFFs) requires 39 GB of disk space. Data are compressed into ten .zip files, one per variable. Each archive will contain all model-scenario combinations and all years for that variable. Each .zip file contains 600 GeoTIFFs. This research was funded by the Broad Agency Announcement Program and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center and Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (ERDC-CRREL) under Contract No. W913E521C0010. The GIPL2-MPI/GCM simulations were supported in part by the high-performance computing and data storage resources operated by the Research Computing Systems Group at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.