Loch Vale Watershed hydroclimate and isotopes of tree-ring cellulose and source-water isotope model

Stable isotopes of water preserved in geologic archives, primarily as oxygen (d18O), have proven critical for documenting Earth’s climatic and hydrologic systems past and present. However, timescale differences of water isotope inputs to proxy systems and the signal embedded in long paleorecords often confound translation to observed hydroclimatic metrics. Here, a unique 20-year dataset of meteorology, hydrology, and the isotopic composition of weekly meteoric and surface water samples (d18O, d2H) are combined with paleoclimate d18O data from tree-ring cellulose and lake carbonate to better understand proxy signals of Upper Colorado river basin drought. Annual tree-ring cellulose d18O from Picea engelmannii growing within a glacier-fed creek and a spring discharge area were used to derive annual source water d18O using a cellulose source-water isotope model. Comparisons with the monitoring record indicates that tree-ring cellulose d18O tracks variations in wet and dry hydroclimatic extremes. The data release contains the annual tree-cellulose isotope data with hydroclimate and water isotope annual averages, including those used for the cellulose source-water isotope model.