The Greenland Water Isotope Database

Situated in the rapidly warming Arctic, Greenland hosts a dynamic ice sheet and changing ecosystems. Stable water isotope values provide key insights into Greenland climate and environmental change, including shifts in the water cycle, ice sheet runoff, atmospheric circulation, and plant stress. Although stable isotopes of modern waters have been used in dozens of studies across Greenland, these data are not universally accessible and lack consistent metadata. We compile published and new stable water isotope values and associated metadata for modern waters from Greenland’s ice-free margins into the Greenland Water Isotope Database (GWID). The GWID aggregates all available data with standardized metadata, enabling flexible searches by several variables including location, sample type, and sampling date. We demonstrate the utility of the GWID with two case studies: first, we test the hypothesis that atmospheric circulation changes linked to the North Atlantic Oscillation cause interannual variability in lake water evapoconcentration in western Greenland; and second, we test the hypothesis that plant water exhibits greater evaporative enrichment than lake water in the same region. By compiling more than 30,000 stable water isotope measurements across nine sample types from much of Greenland’s coastal region, the GWID provides an open-access, flexible resource for investigating climate and ecological processes.