Closing the Global Bomb Radiocarbon Budget
Date: Monday, September 26 @ 13:28:39 MDT
Topic: The Fate of Fossil-Fuel Emissions
by Tobias Naegler
We estimated the production of bomb radiocarbon using available
information on atmospheric nuclear bomb tests, the simple (radio-)carbon cycle
model GRACE (Global RadioCarbon Exploration Model) and atmospheric observations
as constraints. Subsequent forward simulations of the bomb radiocarbon
inventory in the different carbon reservoirs turned out to be in very good
agreement with recent observation-based estimates, therewith for the very first
time allowing to close the global bomb radiocarbon budget. Besides confirming
original stratospheric bomb 14C data published in the reports of the
Health and Safety Laboratories [Telegadas,
1971, and references therein], our results confirm recent observation-based
ocean bomb radiocarbon inventory estimates for the time of GEOSECS (1970s) and
WOCE (1990s) from Peacock [2004] and Key et al. [2004], but refute the GEOSECS ocean inventory
estimates from Broecker et al. [1985, 1995].
Link to Abstract
Link to Slides
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