Project description
Tracing water in a changing climate
Tracing water movement through soil reveals how rainfall infiltrates soils, recharges groundwater, and transports or retains nutrients and pollutants. Scientists use the stable isotopes oxygen-18 and hydrogen-2 to do this. However, rising temperatures and erratic weather patterns distort these vital isotope signals. In cold regions, the interplay of snowmelt, sublimation, and freeze-thaw cycles complicates how isotopes migrate, blurring the data. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ISO-SOITIN project aims to explore how climate shifts compromise the accuracy of these tracers. Pairing field data from sensitive environments with sophisticated transport and fractionation models, the team investigates how soil diversity and transient water flows alter isotopic signatures. This is essential for ensuring our environmental ‘memory’ remains legible as the planet warms.
Objective
The stable natural isotopes 18O, 2H are instrumental hydrological tracers, widely used to study historical climate change. We explore the opposite approach and study how climate change, which is expected to increase temperatures and climate variability, affects isotope tracer signal quality. Signal quality refers to the extent that water can be traced to distinct infiltration events. As isotope fractionation processes are strongly governed by ambient temperatures, we hypothesize that the signal quality of isotope tracers infiltrating into soils may increase under climate change. However, competing effects that degrade signal quality occur during transport through the vadose zone, yielding uncertain total effects on signal quality. E.g. water may experience more frequent and substantial reversals in flux direction, causing more mixing and information loss. In heterogeneous soils, horizontal mixing, and the spatially separate transport of isotopes and heat (which affect fractionation rates nonlinearly) may further degrade signals across multiple spatial scales of observation.
Signal alteration by climate change is especially impactful in cold regions: snowfall has different isotope compositions than rainfall, and freeze-thaw and sublimation-deposition fractionation also occur. Thus, we develop models to simulate isotope transport and fractionation in the vadose zone under spatio-temporally heterogeneous fluxes, validated with field data from diverse vulnerable cold regions. We aim to study how complex interactions arising from climate change, transient fluxes, and soil heterogeneity affect signal quality, and identify implications for isotope tracer research under changing climates. If signal degradation is substantial, paradigm shifts to two-way complex interactions between isotope tracer signals and signal quality is necessary: research must consider how signal quality changes, together with how the signal itself changes, both of which are not easily disentangled.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences climatology climatic changes
You need to log in or register to use this function
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
-
HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
MAIN PROGRAMME
See all projects funded under this programme
Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
See all projects funded under this funding scheme
Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
See all projects funded under this callCoordinator
Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
90014 Oulu
Finland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.