We have a new study out in Geophysical Research Letters. It's a little hard to describe just how much work went into this one...it's the culmination of years and years of efforts by our collaborators at the Institute for Applied Plant Biology to collect lysimeter water samples to measure soil chemistry. I am especially grateful to Sabine Braun for her incredible vision for long-term data collection. We co-opted this effort in order to measure instead the soil water isotopes and use methods developed by folks like our collaborator James Kirchner (ETHZ and WSL), to understand how precipitation passes into the soil. The analysis, by postdoctoral research associate Dr. Emily Burt with my longstanding colleague Dr. Scott Allen (UNR) is a really important contribution to our understanding of soil water dynamics. The lay summary follows here:
When rain falls from the sky and percolates into soils, it flows through the soils, fills empty spaces in soil, or pushes out preexisting water in the soil. We used devices that suction water out of soils and measured the chemistry of those soil waters to learn about water flow processes within soils. In particular, we were interested in how much recent rain is found within soils. We studied many diverse locations throughout Switzerland to see what factors control the amount of recent rain in soil. The amount of recent rain in soils varied widely, even in shallow soils, from no recent rain to nearly half of water being comprised of recent rain. The factors that explained the presence of recent rain the most were physical characteristics of the soil itself, while climate and plant roots explained the presence of recent rain to a lesser degree.
When rain falls from the sky and percolates into soils, it flows through the soils, fills empty spaces in soil, or pushes out preexisting water in the soil. We used devices that suction water out of soils and measured the chemistry of those soil waters to learn about water flow processes within soils. In particular, we were interested in how much recent rain is found within soils. We studied many diverse locations throughout Switzerland to see what factors control the amount of recent rain in soil. The amount of recent rain in soils varied widely, even in shallow soils, from no recent rain to nearly half of water being comprised of recent rain. The factors that explained the presence of recent rain the most were physical characteristics of the soil itself, while climate and plant roots explained the presence of recent rain to a lesser degree.
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