New insights to the chemical and isotopic composition of rainfall across Australia

[摘要] This report describes an analysis of the chemical and isotopic composition of rainfall at 21 locations across Australia for the period May 2007 to December 2011 for the chemistry and April 2008 to May 2010 for the stable isotopes of water. The main objective of this report is to present the raw data in a form that will be of use to other people undertaking hydrological studies rather than to provide a comprehensive analysis of the spatial and temporal trends within the data.The limited analysis undertaken here has provided local meteoric water lines for 21 locations (14 of which in locations previously not studied) and major ion deposition rates for 20 sites (10 of which previously did not have chloride deposition rates published). The stable isotopes of water data is consistent with the long term monitoring at 7 locations archived by the IAEA giving some confidence that the short time series at the 14 sites without long-term data can be used as representative of long term averages which are commonly needed in hydrological applications. A brief comparison of the chloride deposition rates calculated in the present study with previously published data shows that the magnitude of chloride deposition is quite variable with an average of 85% difference across 15 previously published chloride deposition rates at 11 sites. This highlights that that there is a need for routine monitoring of rainfall chemistry across Australia if we are to further constrain the long term average deposition rates.

[发布日期] 2012-06-01 [发布机构] CSIRO

[学科分类] 地球科学(综合)