Tritiated water vapor in the stratosphere: Vertical profiles and residence time

Abstract

The historic and partly unpublished measurements of the tritium content in stratospheric water vapor made at the National Center for Atmospheric Research between 1975 and 1983 are reanalyzed. The resulting vertical profiles of the T content, mainly at 32°N latitude, show little variation with altitude above 20 km but a strong decay with time. This decay is a consequence of the large T injections into the stratosphere by the atmospheric tests of high-yield thermonuclear devices prior to 1963 and seems to proceed with a single e-fold time of 5.12 years. Correcting for the radioactive decay of HTO within the stratosphere and for a temporal increase in stratospheric H 2 O, we obtain a decay time for stratospheric HTO of 7.7 ± 2.0 years. This decay time, which is solely due to the transport of HTO into the troposphere, is much longer than the age of stratospheric air at these altitudes or the accepted values for stratospheric residence times. The differences are discussed and resolved by interpreting the HTO decay time as the Eigentime of the longest-lived mode of the stratospheric transport equations. This Eigentime should provide a useful constraint in modeling stratospheric transport. Copyright 2002 by the American Geophysical Union.