Subarctic

The subarctic is a region in the Northern Hemisphere immediately south of the true Arctic and covering much of Canada and Siberia, the north of Scandinavia, northern Mongolia and the extreme north of Heilongjiang.

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In the Köppen climate classification system it is defined as the region where mean monthly temperatures are above 10 °C for at least one and at most three months of the year. This corresponds to Köppen climate types Cfc, Dfc, Dfd, Dwc and Dwd. In most subarctic climates, aside from the maritime Cfc, precipitation tends to be low due to the low moisture content of the cold air. Typically there is a summer maximum in precipitation ranging from moderate in North America to extreme in the Russian Far East. Except in the wettest areas, glaciers are largely absent because of the lack of winter precipitation; in the wettest areas, however, glaciers tend to be very abundant and Pleistocene glaciation covered even the lowest elevations. Soils of the subarctic are generally very acidic largely because of the influence of the vegetation both in the taiga and in peaty bogs, which tends to acidify the soil, as well as the extreme ease with which leaching of nutrients takes place even in the most heavily glaciated regions. The dominant orders are Spodosols and further north Gelisols.

Northern Hemisphere: The Northern Hemisphere is the half of a planet's surface (or celestial sphere) that is north of the equator (the word hemisphere literally means 'half ball'). On Earth, the Northern Hemisphere contains most of the land and population....

Arctic: The Arctic is the area around the Earth's North Pole. The Arctic includes parts of Russia, Alaska (United States), Canada, Greenland (a territory of Denmark), Iceland, and Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, and Finland), as well as the Arctic Ocean....

Siberia: Siberia (, common English transliterations: Sibir?, Sibir; from the Tatar for ?sleeping land?) is a vast region of Russia and northern Kazakhstan constituting almost all of northern Asia. It extends eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hill...