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Radiocarbon in the Atmosphere

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Radiocarbon and Climate Change

Abstract

This chapter examines the controls on radiocarbon (14C) content of CO2 in the atmosphere over time. It discusses atmospheric observations and their interpretation using models of atmospheric transport, which describe the physical mixing of the atmosphere. This spans the simplest conceptual model of addition of a gas into a single well-mixed box of air, to multi-box models with three-dimensional global or regional atmospheric transport models. This format is applied to atmospheric history for five different time periods when different factors dominated atmospheric 14C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Isotope Centre, GNS Science, Lower Hutt, New Zealand

    J. C. Turnbull

  2. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    J. C. Turnbull

  3. Department of Physics and Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London, London, UK

    H. Graven

  4. Department of Civil Engineering, The City College of New York, New York, NY, USA

    N. Y. Krakauer

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  1. Cetr for Ecosys Sci & Society and Dept, Northern Arizona University, Gainesville, Florida, USA

    Edward A.G. Schuur

  2. Earth System Science, University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, USA

    Ellen Druffel

  3. Max Planck Inst for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany

    Susan E. Trumbore

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Turnbull, J.C., Graven, H., Krakauer, N.Y. (2016). Radiocarbon in the Atmosphere. In: Schuur, E., Druffel, E., Trumbore, S. (eds) Radiocarbon and Climate Change. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25643-6_4

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