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- Title
Response of water vapour D-excess to land-atmosphere interactions in a semi-arid environment.
- Authors
Parkes, Stephen D.; McCabe, Matthew F.; Griffiths, Alan D.; Wang, Lixin; Chambers, Scott; Ershadi, Ali; Williams, Alastair G.; Strauss, Josiah; Element, Adrian
- Abstract
The stable isotopic composition of water vapour provides information about moisture sources and processes that is difficult to obtain with traditional measurement techniques. Recently, it has been proposed that the D-excess (dv = δ2H - 8 × δ18O) of water vapour can provide a diagnostic tracer of continental moisture recycling. However, D-excess exhibits a diurnal cycle that has been observed across a variety of ecosystems and may be influenced by a range of processes beyond regional scale moisture recycling, including local evaporation (ET) fluxes. There is a lack of measurements of D-excess in evaporation (ET) fluxes, which has made it difficult to assess how ET fluxes modify the D-excess in water vapour (dv). With this in mind, we employed a chamber based approach to directly measure D-excess in ET (dET) fluxes. We show that ET fluxes imposed a negative forcing on the ambient vapour and could not explain the higher daytime dv values. The low dET observed here was sourced from a soil water pool that had undergone an extended drying period, leading to low D-excess of the soil moisture. A strong correlation between daytime dv and locally measured relative humidity was consistent with an oceanic moisture source, suggesting that remote hydrological processes were the major contributor to daytime dv variability. During the early evening, ET fluxes into a shallow nocturnal inversion layer caused a lowering of the dv values near the surface. In addition, transient mixing of vapour with a higher D-excess from above the nocturnal inversion modified these values, causing large within night variability. These results indicate dET can generally be expected to show large spatial and temporal variability and to depend on the soil moisture state. For long periods between rain events, common in semi-arid environments, ET would be expected to impose negative forcing on the surface dv. The variability of D-excess in ET fluxes therefore needs to be considered when using dv to study moisture recycling and during extended dry periods may act as a tracer of the relative humidity of the oceanic moisture source.
- Subjects
ATMOSPHERIC water vapor; LAND-atmosphere interactions; STABLE isotopes; EVAPORATION (Meteorology); SOIL moisture; ARID regions
- Publication
Hydrology & Earth System Sciences Discussions, 2016, p1
- ISSN
1812-2108
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5194/hess-2016-271