NOAA Arctic Report Card 2023: Tundra Greenness

Earth’s northernmost continental landmasses and island archipelagos are home to the Arctic tundra biome, a 5.1 million km2 region that forms a “ring” of cold-adapted, treeless vegetation atop the globe, bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north and the boreal forest biome to the south (Raynolds et al. 2019). The biological and physical conditions of Arctic tundra ecosystems are changing profoundly, as vegetation and underlying permafrost soils are strongly influenced by rising air temperatures and the rapid decline of sea ice on the nearby Arctic Ocean (see essays Surface Air Temperature and Sea Ice). In the late 1990s, a sharp increase in the productivity of tundra vegetation became evident in global satellite observations, a phenomenon that soon became known as “the greening of the Arctic.” Arctic greening is dynamically linked with Earth’s changing climate, permafrost, seasonal snow, and sea-ice cover, and remains a focus of multi-disciplinary scientific research.