Massive northern rivers transport huge quantities of water and waterborne constituents from the continents to the Arctic Ocean. During this period of rapid Arctic change, trends in river chemistry and discharge provide powerful insights into changes occurring on land and how they may impact the Arctic Ocean as well as Arctic residents who rely on river and coastal resources. The Arctic Great Rivers Observatory (ArcticGRO) investigates how the chemistry and discharge of the Arctic's largest rivers are changing. This is important because the discharge and chemistry of Arctic rivers reflect processes occurring throughout their watersheds, thus providing an integrative measure of terrestrial change. Changes in river chemistry and discharge also influences the chemistry, biology, sea ice formation, and circulation of the receiving coastal and ocean waters, so understanding Arctic Ocean processes requires knowledge of continental inputs via rivers.
The Arctic Great Rivers Observatory focuses on the Arctic's six largest rivers; the Yukon and Mackenzie in North America and the Ob, Yenisey, Lena, and Kolyma in Siberia. Water samples are collected from each of these rivers six times per year and are analyzed for a wide variety of biogeochemical parameters including nutrients, organic matter, major ions and trace elements, and suspended sediments. ArcticGRO also curates daily discharge data for these six rivers and has begun to gather and disseminate daily discharge data for nine additional rivers in the Russian Arctic. The watersheds of ArcticGRO's six primary rivers account for 67% of the pan-Arctic watershed area and, with the nine additional rivers in the Russian Arctic, ArcticGRO's coverage increases to 77% of the pan-Arctic watershed. Thus, ArcticGRO's water quality sampling and curation of river discharge data captures the vast majority of riverine inputs to the Arctic Ocean. All resulting data are freely available through ArcticGRO's website (arcticgreatrivers.org) and through the Arctic Data Center.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
