Comment on “A comparison of catchment travel times and storage deduced from deuterium and tritium tracers using StorAge Selection functions” by Rodriguez et al. (2021)

Abstract

The combined use of deuterium and tritium to determine travel time distributions (TTDs) in streams is an important development in catchment hydrology (Rodriguez et al., 2021). This comment takes issue with Rodriguez et al.'s assertion that the truncation hypothesis may not hold for catchments in general, i.e. that the use of stable isotopes alone may not lead to underestimation of travel times or storage compared to tritium. We discuss reasons why the truncation hypothesis may not appear to hold for the catchment studied by Rodriguez et al. (2021) but could still apply to the majority of catchments. We also discuss more generally future applications of tritium in Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere catchments.