Arctic-COLORS (Arctic-COastal Land Ocean inteRactionS) Field Campaign
Scoping Study Update and Plans
Abstract
The realization that changes within the Arctic have profound impacts on
ecosystems and human populations across the globe has motivated greater
attention. Yet major gaps remain in our understanding of the feedbacks,
response, and resilience of coastal Arctic ecosystems, communities, and
natural resources to current and future pressures. Most importantly, the
Arctic coastal zone, a vulnerable and complex contiguous landscape of
lakes, streams, wetlands, permafrost, rivers, lagoons, estuaries, and
coastal seas—all modified by snow and ice—remains poorly understood.
To improve our mechanistic understanding and prediction capabilities of
land-ice-ocean interactions in the rapidly changing Arctic coastal zone,
our team proposed a Field Campaign Scoping Study called Arctic-COLORS
(Arctic-COastal Land Ocean inteRactionS) to NASA’s Ocean Biology and
Biogeochemistry Program. Arctic-COLORS aims to quantify the response of
the Arctic coastal environment to global change and anthropogenic
disturbances – an imperative for developing mitigation and adaptation
strategies for the region. Arctic-COLORS is unprecedented, as it
represents the first attempt to study the nearshore coastal Arctic (from
riverine deltas and estuaries out to the coastal sea) as an integrated
land-ocean atmosphere-biosphere system. The overarching objective of
Arctic-COLORS is to quantify the coupled biogeochemical/ecological
response of the Arctic nearshore system to rapidly changing terrestrial
fluxes and ice conditions, in the context of environmental (short-term)
and climate (long-term) change. The science of our field campaign will
focus on three key science themes and several overarching science
questions per theme: (1) Effect of land on nearshore Arctic
biogeochemistry (2) Effect of ice on nearshore Arctic biogeochemistry
(3) Effects of future change (warming land and melting ice) on nearshore
Arctic biogeochemistry This field campaign will be composed of an
integrative measurement approach utilizing a broad range of proven
sampling approaches from a multitude of platforms including autonomous
vehicles to achieve sufficient seasonal and spatial coverage to resolve
the science questions proposed by the Arctic-COLORS team as well as
remote sensing and development of coupled physical-biogeochemical
models.