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The role of stable isotopes in understanding rainfall interception processes: A review.

ABSTRACT: The isotopic composition of water transmitted by the canopy as throughfall or stemflow reflects a suite of processes modifying rainfall. Factors that affect isotopic composition of canopy water include fractionation, exchange between liquid and vapor, and selective transmittance of temporally varying rainfall along varying canopy flowpaths. Despite frequent attribution of canopy effects on isotopic composition of throughfall to evaporative fractionation, data suggest exchange and selection are more likely the dominant factors. Temporal variability in canopy effects is generally consistent with either exchange or selection, but spatial variability is generally more consistent with selection. However, most investigations to date have not collected data sufficient to unambiguously identify controlling processes. Using isotopic data for improved understanding of physical processes and water routing in the canopy requires recognizing how these factors and processes lead to patterns of isotopic variability, and then applying this understanding towards focused data collection and analysis.

SUBMITTER: Allen ST

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6171115 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The role of stable isotopes in understanding rainfall interception processes: A review.

Allen Scott T ST Keim Richard F RF Barnard Holly R HR McDonnell Jeffrey J JJ Brooks J Renée JR

WIREs. Water 20170101 1

The isotopic composition of water transmitted by the canopy as throughfall or stemflow reflects a suite of processes modifying rainfall. Factors that affect isotopic composition of canopy water include fractionation, exchange between liquid and vapor, and selective transmittance of temporally varying rainfall along varying canopy flowpaths. Despite frequent attribution of canopy effects on isotopic composition of throughfall to evaporative fractionation, data suggest exchange and selection are m ...[more]

PMID: 30294444

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Project description:Stable potassium isotopes are one of the emerging non-traditional isotope systems enabled in recent years by the advance of Multi-Collector Inductively-Coupled-Plasma Mass-Spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS). In this review, we first summarize the geochemical and cosmochemical properties of K, its major reservoirs, and the analytical methods of K isotopes. Following this, we review recent literature on K isotope applications in the fields of geochemistry and cosmochemistry. Geochemically, K is a highly incompatible lithophile element, and a highly soluble, biophile element. The isotopic fractionation of K is relatively small during magmatic processes such as partial melting and fractional crystallization, whereas during low-temperature and biological processes fractionation is considerably larger. This resolvable fractionation has made K isotopes promising tracers for a variety of Earth and environmental processes, including chemical weathering, low-temperature alteration of igneous rocks, reverse weathering, and the recycling of sediments into the mantle during subduction. Sorption and interactions of aqueous K with different clay minerals during cation exchange and clay formation are likely to be of fundamental significance in generating much of the K isotope variability seen in samples from the Earth surface and samples carrying recycled surface materials from the deep Earth. The magnitude of this fractionation is process- and mineral-dependent. Comprehensive quantification of pertinent K isotope fractionation factors is currently lacking and urgently needed. Significant fractionation during biological activities, such as plant uptake, demonstrates the potential utility of K isotopes in the study of the nutrient cycle and its relation to the climate and various ecosystems, enabling new and largely unexplored avenues for future research. Of significant importance to the cosmochemistry community, K is a moderately volatile element with large variations in K/U ratio observed among chondrites and planetary materials. As this indicates different degrees of volatile depletion, it has become a fundamental chemical signature of both chondritic and planetary bodies. This volatile depletion has been attributed to various processes such as solar nebula condensation, mixing of volatile-rich and -poor reservoirs, planetary accretional volatilization via impacts, and/or magma ocean degassing. While K isotopes have the potential to distinguish these different processes, the current results are still highly debated. A good correlation between the K isotope compositions of four differentiated bodies (Earth, Mars, Moon, and Vesta) and their masses suggests a ubiquitous volatile depletion mechanism during the formation of the terrestrial planets. It is still unknown whether any of the K isotopic variation among chondrites and differentiated bodies can be attributed to inherited signatures of mass-independent isotopic anomalies.

Dataset Information

The role of stable isotopes in understanding rainfall interception processes: A review.

Publications

The role of stable isotopes in understanding rainfall interception processes: A review.

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