A multiannual ground temperature dataset covering sixteen high elevation sites (3493–4377 m a.s.l.) in the Bale Mountains, Ethiopia

Abstract

Abstract. Tropical mountains and highlands in Africa are under pressure because of anthropogenic climate and land-use change. To determine the impacts of global climate change on the afro-alpine environment and to assess the potential socio-economic consequences, the monitoring of essential climate and environmental variables at high elevation is fundamental. However, long-term climate observations on the continent above 3,000 m are very rare. Here we present a consistent multinannual ground temperature dataset for the BaleMountains in the southern Ethiopian Highlands, which comprise Africa's largest tropical alpine area. 29 ground temperature data loggers have been installed at 16 sites since 2017 to characterise and continuously monitor the mountain climate and ecosystem of the Bale Mountains along an elevation gradient from 3493 to 4377 m. At five sites above ∼ 3900 m, the monitoring will be continued to trace long-term changes. The generated time series provide insights in the spatio temporal ground temperature variations at high elevation, the energy exchange between the ground surface and atmosphere, as well as the impact of vegetation and slope orientation on the thermal dynamics of the ground. To promote the further use of the ground temperature dataset by the wider research community dealing with the climate and geo-ecology of tropical mountains in Eastern Africa, it is made freely available via the open-access repository Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5172002 (Groos et al., 2021b).