Snow-vegetation-atmosphere interactions in alpine tundra

The interannual variability of snow cover in alpine areas is increasing, which may affect the tightly coupled cycles of carbon and water through snow–vegetation–atmosphere interactions across a range of spatio-temporal scales. To explore the role of snow cover for the land–atmosphere exchange of CO2 and water vapor in alpine tundra ecosystems, we combined 3 years (2019–2021) of continuous eddy covariance flux measurements of the net ecosystem exchange of CO2 (NEE) and evapotranspiration (ET) from the Finse site in alpine Norway (1210 m a.s.l.) with a ground-based ecosystem-type classification and satellite imagery from Sentinel-2, Landsat 8, and MODIS. While the snow conditions in 2019 and 2021 can be described as site typical, 2020 features an extreme snow accumulation associated with a strong negative phase of the Scandinavian pattern of the synoptic atmospheric circulation during spring. This extreme snow accumulation caused a 1-month delay in melt-out date, which falls in the 92nd percentile in the distribution of yearly melt-out dates in the period 2001–2021. The melt-out dates follow a consistent fine-scale spatial relationship with ecosystem types across years. Mountain and lichen heathlands melt out more heterogeneously than fens and flood plains, while late snowbeds melt out up to 1 month later than the other ecosystem types. While the summertime average normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was reduced considerably during the extreme-snow year 2020, it reached the same maximum as in the other years for all but one of the ecosystem types (late snowbeds), indicating that the delayed onset of vegetation growth is compensated to the same maximum productivity. Eddy covariance estimates of NEE and ET are gap-filled separately for two wind sectors using a random forest regression model to account for complex and nonlinear ecohydrological interactions. While the two wind sectors differ markedly in vegetation composition and flux magnitudes, their flux response is controlled by the same drivers as estimated by the predictor importance of the random forest model, as well as by the high correlation of flux magnitudes (correlation coefficient r=0.92 for NEE and r=0.89 for ET) between both areas. The 1-month delay of the start of the snow-free season in 2020 reduced the total annual ET by 50 % compared to 2019 and 2021 and reduced the growing-season carbon assimilation to turn the ecosystem from a moderate annual carbon sink (−31 to −6 gC m−2 yr−1) to a source (34 to 20 gC m−2 yr−1). These results underpin the strong dependence of ecosystem structure and functioning on snow dynamics, whose anomalies can result in important ecological extreme events for alpine ecosystems.