2025-11-06 All-Hands Presentation Meeting Notes
Improving representations of hydrological processes in coupled models with water isotope ratios
Rich Fiorella
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Abstract: Use of water isotope ratios as tracers of environmental or climate variations extends back nearly 80 years. The utility of these water isotope ratios arises from an unequal partitioning of heavy and light isotopes during phase changes, which when integrated over the lifetime of water vapor in the atmosphere tends to yield the well-known pattern of lower heavy-to-light isotope ratios at high latitudes and altitudes and in continental interiors. These variations are propagated through the rest of the Earth system and therefore have been used extensively in isotope hydrology studies, ice core analysis, and more generally for examining atmosphere-land/river-ocean exchanges of water and for isotope forensics applications. As such, isotope ratios can provide observational constraints on hydrological processes not apparent from traditionally modeled water state variables alone, and act analogously to unit or regression tests used in software development. In this seminar, I will describe how application of isotope ratios to constraining uncertain physical processes in coupled models improves forecasts and reduces model uncertainty, show an example of how water isotope tracers can reveal processes not apparent from water state alone as applied to understanding urban systems as part of my Early Career project, and discuss extensions to other DOE missions that this capability would enable in E3SM.
Date Nov 6, 2025
Time
PT: 8:30 am
ET: 11:30 am
Call Info
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Time | Title | Presenter | Presentation | Recording | Notes |
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30 min | Improving representations of hydrological processes in coupled models with water isotope ratios | Rich Fiorella Los Alamos National Laboratory | 
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