Articles | Volume 25, issue 12
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-6333-2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-6333-2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comment on “A comparison of catchment travel times and storage deduced from deuterium and tritium tracers using StorAge Selection functions” by Rodriguez et al. (2021)
Michael Kilgour Stewart
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR
Aquifer Dynamics and GNS Science, P.O. Box 30 368, Lower Hutt 5040, New
Zealand
Uwe Morgenstern
GNS Science, P.O. Box 30 368, Lower Hutt 5040, New Zealand
Ian Cartwright
School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University,
Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
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Determining water transit times in aquifers is key to a better understanding of groundwater resources and their sustainable management. For our research, we used high-accuracy tritium data from 35 springs draining the Luxembourg Sandstone aquifer. We assessed the mean transit times of groundwater and found that water moves on average more than 10 times more slowly vertically in the vadose zone of the aquifer (~12 m yr-1) than horizontally in its saturated zone (~170 m yr-1).
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Short summary
The combined use of deuterium and tritium to determine travel time distributions in streams is an important development in catchment hydrology (Rodriguez et al., 2021). This comment, however, argues that their results do not generally invalidate the truncation hypothesis of Stewart et al. (2010) (i.e. that stable isotopes underestimate travel times through catchments), as they imply, but asserts instead that the hypothesis still applies to many other catchments.
The combined use of deuterium and tritium to determine travel time distributions in streams is...