Vapor Transport Modeling of Continental Water Isotope Gradients

Abstract:

Stable isotopes have been widely used to reconstruct past climatic conditions and topographic histories of mountain belts. However, many studies do not account for the influences of evapotranspiration and vapor recycling on downstream meteoric water isotopic compositions. Here we present a case study of the modern Sierra Nevada and Basin and Range to illustrate the value of using process-based models across larger spatial scales to reconstruct the conditions driving local- to regional-scale water isotopic compositions.

We use a one-dimensional reactive vapor transport model, driven by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) high-resolution North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) dataset, to simulate the isotopic composition of modern meteoric waters (δ¹⁸O and δD) along storm tracks across the Sierra Nevada and Basin and Range. Storm track pathways are generated using NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory’s Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) model. In addition, we couple the vapor transport model with a soil moisture model to simulate depth profiles of the oxygen isotopic composition of authigenic carbonate along our storm tracks. We show that, given reasonable estimates of the modern partitioning between evaporation and transpiration, our model output is in agreement with modern isotopic data both from compilations of published meteoric water samples and from newly collected soil carbonate samples along a transect across the northern Sierra Nevada and Basin and Range (~38-42° N). These results demonstrate that our modeling approach can be used to analyze the relative contributions of climate and topography to observed isotopic gradients. Future studies can apply this modeling framework to isotopes preserved in the geologic record to provide a quantitative means of understanding the paleoclimatic influences on spatial isotopic distributions.