Deuterium excess in Greenland snow: Analysis with simple and complex models

A simple Rayleigh-type isotope model, typical of those used to develop algorithms for extracting climatic information from stable water isotope paleodata, is evaluated against the more complex and presumably more reliable calculations of a general circulation model (GCM) fitted with isotope tracer diagnostics. The evaluation centers on an analysis of how the temperature T-e of an oceanic moisture source affects the deuterium excess d of Greenland precipitation. The annual T-e-d relationship derived from the GCM diagnostics is largely reproduced by the simple isotope model when the latter is properly initialized. This, coupled with the fact that the GCM itself reproduces observed isotope behavior, suggests that the simpler model's atmospheric calculations are indeed adequate for isotope studies. Furthermore, the GCM results support the idea, originally developed with the simpler models, that polar deuterium excess values contain information on meteorological conditions at distant evaporative sources.