Quantifying Permafrost Degradation Processes: Real‐Time Analysis Using Environment‐Based Particle Image Velocimetry and Weather Data

We present an innovative approach to understanding permafrost degradation processes through the application of new environment‐based particle image velocimetry (E‐PIV) to time‐lapse imagery and correlation with synchronous temperature and rainfall measurements. Our new approach to extracting quantitative vector movement from dynamic environmental conditions that can change both the position and the color balance of each image has optimized the trade‐off between noise reduction and preserving the authenticity of movement data. Despite the dynamic polar environments and continuous landscape movements, the E‐PIV provides the first quantitative real‐time associations between environmental drivers and the responses of permafrost degradation mechanism. We analyze four event‐based datasets from an island southwest of Tuktoyaktuk, named locally as Imnaqpaaluk or Peninsula Point near Tuktoyaktuk, NWT, Canada, spanning a 5‐year period from 2017 to 2022. The 2017 dataset focuses on the interaction during a hot dry summer between slope movement and temperature changes, laying the foundation for subsequent analyses. In 2018, two datasets significantly expand our understanding of typical failure mechanisms in permafrost slopes: one investigates the relationship between slope movement and rainfall, while the other captures an overhang collapse, providing a rare quantitative observation of an acute landscape change event. The 2022 dataset revisits the combination of potential rain and air temperature‐related forcing to explore the environment–slope response relationship around an ice wedge, a common feature of ice‐rich permafrost coasts. These analyses reveal both a direct but muted association with air temperatures and a detectable delayed slope response to the occurrence of rainfall, potentially reflective of the time taken for the warm rainwater to infiltrate through the active layer and affect the frozen ground. Whilst these findings also indicate that other factors are likely to influence permafrost degradation processes, the associations have significant implications given the projections for a warmer, wetter Arctic. The ability to directly measure permafrost slope responses offers exciting new potential to quantitatively assess the sensitivity of different processes of degradation for the first time, improving the vulnerability components of hazard risk assessments, guiding mitigation efforts, and better constraining future projections of erosion rates and the mobilization of carbon‐rich material.