Precipitation oxygen and hydrogen isotopes, Toolik Lake, Alaska, 2016

As part of our broader efforts to understand how global climate change is influencing Arctic ecosystems, we maintain efforts to collect and analyze precipitation from Toolik Field station. In 2016 these efforts were focused on understanding the isotopic characteristics of potential plant water sources. To this end, precipitation was collected with a funnel following every precipitation event from June through August (30 precipitation events), and snow samples were collected in 20cm depth increments from the drift created by the snowfence at the moist tussock tundra site. Samples were analyzed for 18O and 2H with a Picarro L2130-i cavity ring down-spectrometer at the University of Alaska-Anchorage.