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Permafrost landscapes in the Arctic are highly vulnerable to warming, with rapid changes underway. High-resolution remote sensing, especially aerial datasets, offers valuable insights into current permafrost characteristics and thaw dynamics. Here, we present a new dataset of very high resolution orthomosaics, point clouds, and digital surface models that we acquired over permafrost landscapes in northwestern Canada and northern and northwestern Alaska for the purpose of better understanding the impacts of climate change on permafrost landscapes. The imagery was collected with the Modular Aerial Camera System (MACS) during aerial campaigns conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute in the summers of 2018, 2019, and 2021. The MACS was specifically developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for operation under challenging light conditions in polar environments. It features cameras in the optical and the near-infrared wavelengths with up to a 16 MP resolution. We processed the images to four-band (blue–green–red–near-infrared) orthomosaics and digital surface models with spatial resolutions of 7 to 20 cm as well as 3D point clouds with point densities of up to 41 points m−2. The dataset collection features 102 subprojects from 35 target regions (1.4–161.1 km2 in size). Project sizes range from 4.8 to 336 GB. In total, 3.17 TB were published. The horizontal precision of the datasets is in the range of 1–2 px and vertical precision is better than 0.10 m. The datasets are not radiometrically calibrated. Overall, these very high resolution images and point clouds provide significant opportunities for mapping permafrost landforms and generating detailed training datasets for machine learning, can serve as a baseline for change detection for thermokarst and thermo-erosion processes, and help with upscaling of field measurements to lower-resolution satellite observations. The dataset is available on the PANGAEA repository at 10.1594/PANGAEA.961577. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Permafrost landscapes across the Arctic are very susceptible to a warming climate and are currently experiencing rapid change. High-resolution remote sensing datasets present a valuable source of information to better analyze and quantify current permafrost landscape characteristics and impacts of climate change on the environment. In particular, aerial datasets can provide further understanding of permafrost landscapes in transition due to local and widespread thaw. We here present a new dataset of super-high-resolution digital orthophotos, photogrammetric point clouds, and digital surface models that we 5 acquired over permafrost landscapes in northwestern Canada, northern, and western Alaska. The imagery was collected with the Modular Aerial Camera System (MACS) during aerial campaigns conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute in the summers of 2018, 2019, and 2021. The MACS was specifically developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for operation under challenging light conditions in polar environments. It features cameras in the optical and the near-infrared wavelengths with up to 16 megapixels. We processed the images to four-band (blue - green - red - near-infrared) orthomosaics, digital surface 10 models with spatial resolutions of 7 to 20 cm, and 3D point clouds with point densities up to 44 pts/m3. This super-highresolution dataset provides opportunities for generating detailed training datasets of permafrost landform inventories, a baseline for change detection for thermokarst and thermo-erosion processes, and upscaling of field measurements to lower-resolution satellite observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]