Visser Ate, Thaw Melissa, Esser Brad
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division, 7000 East Ave, Livermore, CA 94550, United States.
University of California - Merced, Sierra Nevada Research Institute, 5200 North Lake Rd. Merced, CA 95343, United States.
J Environ Radioact. 2018 Jan;181:42-51. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvrad.2017.10.008. Epub 2017 Nov 20.
Understanding the behavior of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, in the environment is important to evaluate the exposure risk of anthropogenic releases, and for its application as a tracer in hydrology and oceanography. To understand and predict the variability of tritium in precipitation, HYSPLIT air mass trajectories were analyzed for 16 aggregate precipitation samples collected over a 2 year period at irregular intervals at a research site located at 2000 m elevation in the southern Sierra Nevada (California, USA). Attributing the variation in tritium to specific source areas confirms the hypothesis that higher latitude or inland sources bring higher tritium levels in precipitation than precipitation originating in the lower latitude Pacific Ocean. In this case, the source of precipitation accounts for 79% of the variation observed in tritium concentrations. Air mass trajectory analysis is a promising tool to improve the predictions of tritium in precipitation at unmonitored locations and thoroughly understand the processes controlling transport of tritium in the environment.
了解氢的放射性同位素氚在环境中的行为，对于评估人为释放的暴露风险以及将其用作水文和海洋学中的示踪剂至关重要。为了理解和预测降水中氚的变异性，对位于美国加利福尼亚州内华达山脉南部海拔2000米的一个研究站点在两年期间不定期收集的16个总降水样本进行了HYSPLIT气团轨迹分析。将氚的变化归因于特定源区证实了这样的假设，即高纬度或内陆源区带来的降水中的氚水平高于源自低纬度太平洋的降水。在这种情况下，降水来源占氚浓度观测到的变化的79%。气团轨迹分析是一种很有前景的工具，可用于改进未监测地点降水中氚的预测，并全面了解控制环境中氚传输的过程。
