Modulation of Cosmogenic Tritium in Meteoric Precipitation by the 11-year Cycle of Solar Magnetic Field Activity

Palcsu, László; Morgenstern, Uwe; Sültenfuß, Jürgen; Koltai, Gabriella; László, E.; Temovski, Marjan; Major, Z.; Nagy, J.; Papp, L.; Varlam, Carmen; Făurescu, Ionut; Túri, Marianna; Rinyu, László; Czuppon, György; Bottyán, Emese; Jull, A. J. T.

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-31208-9

Cited by 31 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Local maxima in the tritium activity concentration in precipitation were observed simultaneously with maxima in neutron flux (minima in sunspot numbers). Our data ( Figure 12) also showed local maxima in mean annual values and larger variability in 1996, 2007, and 2018 in accordance with the observations presented in Reference [93].…”

Section: Trends In Tritium Activity Concentrationsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…The slopes and intercepts determined using Bomb-produced tritium in precipitation until about 1995 prevented studies on whether the natural production of tritium was influenced by variations in solar activities. The modulation of cosmogenic tritium production by an 11-year solar cycle has been recently shown in precipitation at several stations worldwide [93]. Local maxima in the tritium activity concentration in precipitation were observed simultaneously with maxima in neutron flux (minima in sunspot numbers).…”

Section: Local Meteoric Water Linementioning

confidence: 86%

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Long-Term Isotope Records of Precipitation in Zagreb, Croatia

Bronić

Barešić

Borković

et al. 2020

Water

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The isotope composition of precipitation has been monitored in monthly precipitation at Zagreb, Croatia, since 1976. Here, we present a statistical analysis of available long-term isotope data (3H activity concentration, δ2H, δ18O, and deuterium excess) and compare them to basic meteorological data. The aim was to see whether isotope composition reflected observed climate changes in Zagreb: a significant increase in the annual air temperature and larger variations in the precipitation amount. Annual mean δ18O and δ2H values showed an increase of 0.017‰ and 0.14‰ per year, respectively, with larger differences in monthly mean values in the first half of the year than in the second half. Mean annual d-excess remained constant over the whole long-term period, with a tendency for monthly mean d-excess values to decrease in the first half of the year and increase in the second half due to the influence of air masses originating from the eastern Mediterranean. Changes in the stable isotope composition of precipitation thus resembled changes in the temperature, the circulation pattern of air masses, and the precipitation regime. A local meteoric water line was obtained using different regression methods, which did not result in significant differences between nonweighted and precipitation-weighted slope and intercept values. Deviations from the Global Meteoric Water Line GMWL (lower slopes and intercepts) were observed in two recent periods and could be explained by changes in climate parameters. The temperature gradient of δ18O was 0.33‰/°C. The tritium activity concentrations in precipitation showed slight decreases during the last two decades, and the mean A in the most recent period, 2012–2018, was 7.6 ± 0.8 Tritium Units (TU).

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Section: Trends In Tritium Activity Concentrationsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Local Meteoric Water Linementioning

confidence: 86%

Long-Term Isotope Records of Precipitation in Zagreb, Croatia

Bronić

Barešić

Borković

et al. 2020

Water

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“…Thus in a few decades, tritium could be even more informative about old water contributions because there may be no age ambiguity anymore. Furthermore, the oscillations of tritium in precipitation over long time scales (> 10 years) recently detected and related to cycles of solar magnetic activity (Palcsu et al, 2018) may give stream tritium concentrations even more age-specific meaning. Therefore it is important to re-iterate the call of Stewart et al (2012) to start sampling tritium in streams now and for the next decades to use it in travel time analyses.…”

Section: Yet Tritium Seems To Reveal Older Water!mentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the truncation of travel times with StorAge Selection functions using deuterium and tritium as tracers

Rodriguez

Pfister

Zehe

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Abstract. Catchment travel time distributions (TTDs) are an efficient concept to summarize the time-varying 3-dimensional transport of water and solutes to an outlet in a single function of water age and to estimate catchment storage by leveraging information contained in tracer data (e.g. 2H and 3H). It is argued that the increasing use of the stable isotopes of O and H compared to tritium as tracers has truncated our vision of streamflow TTDs, meaning that the long tails associated with old water are neglected. However, the reasons for the truncation of the TTD tails are still obscured by methodological and data limitations. In this study, we went beyond these limitations and tested the hypothesis that streamflow TTDs calculated using only deuterium (2H) or only tritium (3H) are different. We similarly tested if the mobile catchment storage (derived from the TTDs) associated with each tracer is different. For this we additionally constrained a model successfully developed to simulate high-frequency stream deuterium measurements with about 30 stream tritium measurements over the same period (2015–2017). We used data from the forested headwater Weierbach catchment (42 ha) in Luxembourg. The streamflow TTDs were estimated in unsteady conditions by using both tracers coherently within a framework based on StorAge Selection (SAS) functions. We found equal TTDs and equal mobile storage between the 2H- and 3H-derived estimates. The truncation hypothesis was thus rejected. The small differences we found could be explained by the calculation uncertainties and by a limited sampling frequency for tritium. Using both stable and radioactive isotopes of H as tracers reduced the age and storage uncertainties. Although tritium and stable isotopes had redundant information about younger water, using both tracers better exploited the more specific information about longer ages that 3H inherently contains, and it could be even better in the next decades. The two tracers thus had overall different information contents. Tritium was however slightly more informative and cost-effective than stable isotopes for travel time analysis. We thus reiterate the call of Stewart et al. (2012) to measure tritium in the streams for travel time analysis, and emphasize the need for high-frequency tritium sampling in future studies to match the resolution in stable isotopes.

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“…Tritium content is expressed in tritium units (TU), where 1 TU = 0.118 Bq L −1 . This dataset was obtained from the Global Network of Isotopes in Precipitation (GNIP; IAEA, 2019), the Austrian Network of Isotopes in Precipitation (Umweltbundesamt, 2019), the Slovenian Network of Isotopes in Precipitation (SLONIP; SLONIP, 2020; Vreča and Malenšek, 2016), and published data (Fórizs et al, 2020;Krajcar Bronić et al, 2020;Mandić et al, 2008;Palcsu et al, 2018). Until 1973 tritium activity data were only available from Austria.…”

Section: Used 3 H and Precipitation Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Natural tritium is formed mainly by spallation reactions of protons and neutrons of primary and secondary cosmic radiation with atmospheric nuclei, mainly by the interaction of fast neutrons with atmospheric nitrogen (Lal and Peters, 1967). Tritium emission by thermonuclear tests between the 1950s and 1980 enormously exceeded the natural production (Araguas-Araguas et al, 1996;Palcsu et al, 2018). Since that time, tritium emission to the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources (e.g., nuclear industry, medical applications, luminizing industry) has corresponded to ∼ 10 % of the natural production and influences 3 H content in precipitation mainly at local to regional scales (Araguas-Araguas et al, 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Isoscape of amount-weighted annual mean precipitation tritium (<sup>3</sup>H) activity from 1976 to 2017 for the Adriatic–Pannonian region – AP<sup>3</sup>H_v1 database

Kern

Erdélyi²,

Vreča

et al. 2020

Earth Syst. Sci. Data

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Abstract. Tritium (3H) as a constituent of the water molecule is an important natural tracer in hydrological sciences. The anthropogenic tritium introduced into the atmosphere unintentionally became an excellent tracer of processes on a time scale of up to 100 years. A prerequisite for tritium applications is to know the distribution of tritium activity in precipitation. Here we present a database of isoscapes derived from 41 stations for amount-weighted annual mean tritium activity in precipitation for the period 1976 to 2017 on spatially continuous interpolated 1 km×1 km grids for the Adriatic–Pannonian region (called the AP3H_v1 database), with a special focus on post-2010 years, which are not represented by existing global models. Five stations were used for out-of-sample evaluation of the model performance, independently confirming its capability of reproducing the spatiotemporal tritium variability in the region. The AP3H database is capable of providing reliable spatiotemporal input for hydrogeological application at any place within Slovenia, Hungary, and their surroundings. Results also show a decrease in the average spatial representativity of the stations regarding tritium activity in precipitation from ∼440 km in 1970s, when bomb tritium still prevailed in precipitation, to ∼235 km in the 2010s. The post-2010 isoscapes can serve as benchmarks for background tritium activity for the region, helping to determine potential future local increases in technogenic tritium from these backgrounds. The gridded tritium isoscape is available in NetCDF-4 at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.896938 (Kern et al., 2019).

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Modulation of Cosmogenic Tritium in Meteoric Precipitation by the 11-year Cycle of Solar Magnetic Field Activity

Cited by 31 publications

References 50 publications

Long-Term Isotope Records of Precipitation in Zagreb, Croatia

Long-Term Isotope Records of Precipitation in Zagreb, Croatia

Testing the truncation of travel times with StorAge Selection functions using deuterium and tritium as tracers

Isoscape of amount-weighted annual mean precipitation tritium (<sup>3</sup>H) activity from 1976 to 2017 for the Adriatic–Pannonian region – AP<sup>3</sup>H_v1 database

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Modulation of Cosmogenic Tritium in Meteoric Precipitation by the 11-year Cycle of Solar Magnetic Field Activity

Cited by 31 publications

References 50 publications

Long-Term Isotope Records of Precipitation in Zagreb, Croatia

Long-Term Isotope Records of Precipitation in Zagreb, Croatia

Testing the truncation of travel times with StorAge Selection functions using deuterium and tritium as tracers

Isoscape of amount-weighted annual mean precipitation tritium (&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;H) activity from 1976 to 2017 for the Adriatic–Pannonian region – AP&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;H_v1 database

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Isoscape of amount-weighted annual mean precipitation tritium (<sup>3</sup>H) activity from 1976 to 2017 for the Adriatic–Pannonian region – AP<sup>3</sup>H_v1 database