Krypton-85 datasets of the northern and southern hemisphere collected over the past 60 years

Abstract

With a half-life of 10.7 years, the noble gas radioisotope 85 Kr is perfectly suited as a tracer to date ice and water that formed during the past half century. Furthermore, due to its inhomogeneous input into the atmosphere, it is a useful tool to investigate atmospheric circulation and back-trajectory analysis. The data presented here represent a comprehensive time series of atmospheric 85 Kr activity concentrations in ground level air that can be used to model northern and southern hemispheric input functions, which is essential to apply 85 Kr as a dating tracer. The collection comprises 11 datasets from 4 monitoring stations in the northern and 7 monitoring stations in the southern hemisphere, respectively. In total, it contains about 8000 measurements performed over the past 60 years, making it the largest published 85 Kr record.

Modelling 85Kr datasets with python for applications in tracer hydrology and to investigate atmospheric circulation

“…These trends and fluctuations are clearly detectable in the 85 Kr datasets at the monitoring stations, which form the basis of the modelling tool that is presented here. This data analysis and plotting tool is written in python 3.8 and is designed to evaluate a comprehensive 85 Kr dataset [1] for dating water and ice and to investigate atmospheric circulation [5] . However, certain functions of this tool can be applied to similar datasets as well.…”

“…For a better understanding of the individual functions of the model, they are applied to the 85 Kr data collection in [1] . The main script functions.py as well as an example script example.py together with a requirements.txt and a readme.txt file can be found in the supplementary material.…”

Online monitoring of atmospheric krypton-85 with hourly time resolution

“…Its current activity in the air is about 1.5 Bq m −3 . 3,4 The atmospheric 85 Kr has been monitored because of its potential impacts on human health and the environment. 5–7 Being a good environmental tracer, 85 Kr is also used to date young groundwater and seawater.…”