Comment on essd-2021-54

Abstract

The authors introduce 6 years of meteorological, soil and, snow data collected at a tundra site in the Canadian high Arctic. The observed polygonal tundra environment located on Bylot Island, Nunavut is described as well-drained, void of standing vegetation, and typical of permafrost landscape. A thorough review of instrumentation, datasets, and validation at the site are presented prior to an assessment of data quality and correction of the temporal data where necessary. The authors highlight a lack of data available to drive snow physics models in herb (graminoid) tundra environments as motivation. Thin Arctic snowpack common to this area, and greater Arctic regions, consist of contrasting highdensity winds slab and lower-density depth hoar elements. The predominate drivers of this composition, wind compaction and upward flux of water vapour, are clearly identified by the authors as a gap in the current generation snow physics models requiring new datasets to evaluate against and improve from.