Effects of climatic seasonality on the isotopic  composition of evaporating soil waters

Benettin, Paolo; Volkmann, Till H. M.; von Freyberg, Jana; Frentress, Jay; Penna, Daniele; Dawson, Todd E.; Kirchner, James W.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-2881-2018

Articles | Volume 22, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-2881-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-2881-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 5

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

15 May 2018

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 15 May 2018

Effects of climatic seasonality on the isotopic composition of evaporating soil waters

Paolo Benettin, Till H. M. Volkmann, Jana von Freyberg, Jay Frentress, Daniele Penna, Todd E. Dawson, and James W. Kirchner

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-2881-2018-supplement

Data sets

Global Network of Isotopes in Precipitation. The GNIP Database IAEA/WMO https://nucleus.iaea.org/wiser

Short summary

Evaporation causes the isotopic composition of soil water to become different from that of the original precipitation source. If multiple samples originating from the same source are available, they can be used to reconstruct the original source composition. However, soil water is influenced by seasonal variability in both precipitation sources and evaporation patterns. We show that this variability, if not accounted for, can lead to biased estimates of the precipitation source water.