The role of soil processes in δ¹⁸O terrestrial climate proxies

Abstract

O years could be misinterpreted as wet conditions (due to decreased evaporative enrichment) when instead drier conditions are equally as likely.

Mid-Holocene drying of the U.S. Great Basin recorded in Nevada speleothems

“…The shorter record from CDR3, which does not show significant covariability between  18 O and  13 C ( Supplementary Figure 2), shows reasonable agreement with the overlapping portion of the Leviathan Cave record, but during the mid-Holocene Leviathan Cave  18 O values are substantially more positive than values in Lehman Cave sample WR11. This poor reproducibility, along with other studies of  18 O in semi-arid regions (Kanner et al, 2014;Mickler et al, 2006), urges caution in linking  18 O records from single stalagmites directly to  18 O values of precipitation in the Great Basin.…”

Seasonal temperature and precipitation recorded in the intra-annual oxygen isotope pattern of meteoric water and tree-ring cellulose

“…The work presented here is based on empirical relationships from global datasets, but may not be applicable to certain environments. For example, studies have shown that within fog-dominated ecosystems (Anchukaitis et al, 2008;Roden et al, 2009), semiarid environments (Kanner et al, 2014), or regions where seasonal variation in d 18 O MW is affected by large-scale vapor transport patterns (Bowen, 2008;Bowen and Wilkinson, 2002;Breecker, 2013;Liu et al, 2013;Saurer et al, 2012) the local effects of changes in moisture source on the intra-annual d 18 O cell pattern may be important. Our dataset does include such ecosystems [e.g., site 26 (significant fog); sites 1, 4, 11e13 (dry, MAP < 500 mm); sites 6, 16, 18e19, 22e25, 30e31 (monsoonal)] and our model using only changes in seasonal temperature and precipitation amount does successfully explain much of the variability in the measured intraring d 18 O cell signal worldwide (R 2 ¼ 0.82) (Fig.…”

Annually resolved δ&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;H tree-ring chronology of the lignin methoxyl groups from Germany reflects averaged Western European surface air temperature changes

“…3b). When comparing this discrepancy to F3, having a similar age as F4 (7 years apart; (Allison, 1982;Hsieh et al, 1998;Kanner et al, 2014 canopy. A decrease in relative humidity with height has been observed in temperate forests (Eliáš et al, 1989;Zweifel et al, 2002), which would intensify 18 O enrichment as leaf water evaporation rates increase with tree height (Labuhn et al, 2014 We developed a chronology (without conducting any detrending or correction method) for the common period 1916-2015 by calculating for each of the nine tree-ring series the annual δ²H LM deviation to the mean of the 1961-1990 period.…”