FORTE addresses a pressing and unresolved Earth System science question: How do nearshore Arctic ecosystems, from lower watersheds to coastlines and adjacent seas, respond to changes in the mobilization, magnitude, composition, and seasonality in land-ocean fluxes (freshwater, heat, carbon, sediment and nutrients) and what are the implications for climate change feedbacks and amplification? This overarching question drives three specific and testable hypotheses regarding:
- The impact of warming and intensified Arctic River discharge on river plumes, coastal erosion, and spatiotemporal transitions between sources and sinks of carbon and energy.
- Changes in the relative importance and interplay of coupled physical/biogeochemical processes in transforming land-ocean fluxes, as environmental conditions change in the Arctic.
- The response of phytoplankton populations to a changing Arctic, also as relates to growing risk of harmful algal blooms and impacts on marine resources and food security.
Continued development and extraction of resources in these vulnerable ecosystems increases the necessity to quantify how the nearshore Arctic will respond to climate change impacts. Addressing the proposed hypotheses and applying suborbital observations to improve predictions of Arctic change is, thus, not only a science priority but also a socioeconomic imperative.