Workshop «Water Isotopes: From Weather to Climate»: Summary

Summary of hybrid workshop «Water isotopes: From Weather to Climate»

Time: 15-17 November 2021
Format: Distributed hybrid workshop with national hubs and individual zoom participation
Organizing Committee:
Harald Sodemann, University of Bergen, Norway
Franziska Aemisegger, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Camille Risi, LMD/CNRS, France

Stable water isotopes offer unique insight into a wide variety of Earth System processes, including the atmospheric, terrestrial, glacial and oceanic components. While many processes that affect the water isotopes take place on the time scale of weather events and below, their cumulative effect imprints on the climatic record in observations and proxy archives. The principal idea of this workshop was to provide opportunities for the community to develop a common understanding on how water isotope processes work and how they influence the climate signal, through studies involving  observations, laboratory work, theory, modelling, and model-data integration.

We invited submission of abstracts to one of the following 3 sessions:

• • Water isotope observations on weather time scales
  • Water isotope modelling and model-data integration
  • Water isotopes from weather to climate time scales

Workshop results

• • Download the final «Book of Abstracts» from this website.
  • Selected presentations are available on the Youtube channel of the workshop.
  • An overview of the workshop schedule, and PDFs of selected poster and oral presentations are available below.
  • Participants collected a list of recent published articles for the period 2019-2021 during the workshop.

During the workshop, discussion sessions were conducted with the following topics:

• • Stable water isotope observation and model inter-comparisons
  • Data sharing and formats for models and observations
  • Communicating about water isotopes with non-specialists
  • Going from weather to climate with isotopes: how to close the gap?

A final report from this workshop, including a summary of the discussion sessions, will be published here in the coming weeks.

Organisation

The 3-day event was organised as a distributed hybrid workshop, centered on 4 local hubs, in Bergen, Norway; Zürich, Switzerland; Bremen,Germany, and Tokyo, Japan. Participants either joined one of the local hubs in person, or participated in the workshop online as individuals via zoom. Poster sessions were conducted using the online platform gather.town. With overall 160 registered participants across many time zones, and on average 70-90 active participants during each of the 3 half-day sessions, there was substantial active participation throughout the workshop.

Motivation and organisation

The workshop continued from the last major international workshop in water isotope science, «Water Isotopes and Climate» in Boulder, Colorado in 2019, organised by US CLIVAR. In the recently published workshop report from that meeting, several important topics are outlined that are valuable for the water isotope community to discuss, pursue, and develop further. In addition, the pandemic has made it very difficult for young scientists to build their professional networks in a regular way, due to the lack of visiting opportunities and personal conference participation. We therefore organised this workshop in a hybrid format with national/local hubs that enabled some degree of personal interaction if current respective national regulations allow. For all participants, but in particular those that are not able to join one of the local hubs, we contributed to increased feedback and exchange to talks and posters by assigned commenters. Poster sessions were conducted as digital sessions using gather.town.

List of participants

The list of participants, including email addresses in a non-machine readable format is available here:  Stable_Isotopes_Workshop_2021_Participants_List

Mailing list

We have created a mailing list that allows sending announcements about open positions, informing about new publications, new data, or fieldwork or asking general questions. Sign up to the mailing list on the waterisotopes mailing list home page.

Final detailed programme

The programme contains links to the abstracts, video recordings, and PDFs if available. You can watch entire sessions by following the youtube link to the individual oral sessions.

Oral Session 1: Monday, 15 Nov 2021 (Youtube link)

Oral Session 2: Tuesday, 16 Nov 2021 (Youtube link)

Oral Session 3: Wednesday, 17 Nov 2021 (Youtube link)

Camille Risi: A Summary and recap of day 3 of the workshop [Page].

This workshop was supported by funding from the Norwegian Research Council through the project SNOWPACE, and the European Commission by ERC Consolidator Grant project ISLAS.

Last update: 22 January 2022