Welcome to the supplemental website for Atmospheric vapor and precipitation are not in isotopic equilibrium in a continental mountain environment. Because there was so much going on in the paper (potentially too much), I thought I would include some extra information to help folks better understand or explore the data that was collected. My hope is that some of the additional context will prove useful in future endeavors hoping to use the data collected, invoke a similar analysis, etc.

Major findings

This paper combined a number of novel elements (e.g., temporal scale and resolution, environment, Bayesian analysis) to analyze the validity of a common assumption made by practicing isotope hydrologists: That precipitation and vapor are in isotopic equilibrium. While it is not surprising or exceptional that we found this assumption to be inaccurate (the literature seems to go back and forth on the validity of the assumption, as highlighted in the introduction of the paper), this is the first study to quantify the uncertainties generated by such an assumption over a long period of time using a Bayesian framework. In aggregate, our findings suggest that the equilibrium assumption is likely reasonable over longer periods of time (in accordance with principles of mass balance). However, over shorter evaluation times and periods of large potential evapotranspiration (or possibly sublimation), we need to account for kinetic or nonequilibrium (e.g., source) effects. Not accounting for such effects leads to very large errors that make hydrological inference very difficult, if not impossible.

An updated conceptual model of the processes being recorded by the stable vapor isotope values of the atmosphere. This model is more complicated than the typical equilibrium assumption, but is also more realistic. In some respects, this model is disappointing, because it means we cannot make a simple set of measurements to estimate an important boundary condition. However, the fact that vapor is integrating so many processes also represents an opportunity to better understand which factors are being recorded by atmospheric vapor.


Compendium information

I am an open science advocate, which means trying to generate reproducible research and ensure the data and code I’ve used or made is open to others. So, in addition to the manuscript and this site, there is also a compendium that contains all raw and processed data, code, and writing materials used and generated for the paper. The hope of sharing the compendium is to further contextualize the data collected and the code used to generate the results and interpretations. The full compendium can be found here, but also checkout the data page. Please let me know if you’ve found any mistakes or have suggestions of how I could improve my analysis — I’m a big fan constructive criticism.

Making the website

For those interested, this site was made using the rmarkdown package in R. For more on using rmarkdown to make websites, check out this chapter in the R Markdown book. It was pretty fun to learn what I can do in terms of making static sites using a combination of R, html, css, javascript, etc.

If you’d like to see the underlying source code used to generate the site (i.e., the .Rmd files rendered to html), then click here (or click the GitLab icon in the upper right corner of the navbar — it looks like a fox) to go to the GitLab repo hosting the site (code for this site is located in the public/ folder). Additionally, the repo contains the functions and scripts used to analyze the data associated with the paper, if you want to check that out, too (though the compendium hosts both the code and data, for richer context).

About the first author

Depending on when you read this site, Jason is a PhD candidate at the University of Wyoming in the Water Resources / Environmental Science & Engineering interdisciplinary PhD program. To see what he’s up to these days, check out his blog, wetlandscapes.com, which has more info related to publications, tutorials, CV, etc.