Developing the Model of the Morphological Pattern for Thermokarst Plains with Fluvial Erosion Involving Remote Sensing Data

The paper reports a new variant of the model of the morphological pattern for thermokarst plains with fluvial erosion involving numerous remote sensing data. This variant of the model takes into account different trends of the thermokarst processes for watershed plains and lowered bottoms of khasyreis (drained thermokarst lakes). The given model is tested at eight key sites located in different physiography, climate and geocryology. Testing was based on the high-resolution remote sensing data. The developed model is verified with a statistical analysis of lake area distributions within both watershed plain surface and lowered bottoms of khasyreis, demonstrating a state of dynamic balance in the course of emergence, growth and drainage of the thermokarst lakes. The analysis shows that the morphological pattern of the thermokarst plains with fluvial erosion changes evolutionarily, with reducing the area of the main watershed surface according to a dependence close to exponential; the specific type of the dependence results primarily from the ratio of the lake generation density and the location density of the fluvial sources.