Open-path measurement of stable water isotopologues using mid-infrared dual-comb spectroscopy

Abstract

We present an open-path mid-infrared dual-comb spectroscopy (DCS) system capable of precise measurement of the stable water isotopologues H216O and HD16O. This system ran in a remote configuration at a rural test site for 3.75 months with 60 % uptime and achieved a precision of < 2 ‰ on the normalized ratio of H216O and HD16O (D) in 1000 s. Here, we compare the D values from the DCS system to those from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) isotopologue point sensor network. Over the multi-month campaign, the mean difference between the DCS D values and the NEON D values from a similar ecosystem is < 2 ‰ with a standard deviation of 18 ‰, which demonstrates the inherent accuracy of DCS measurements over a variety of atmospheric conditions. We observe time-varying diurnal profiles and seasonal trends that are mostly correlated between the sites on daily timescales. This observation motivates the development of denser ecological monitoring networks aimed at understanding regional-and synoptic-scale water transport. Precise and accurate open-path measurements using DCS provide new capabilities for such networks.