SLONIP

Last updated on May 10, 2024, 2:49 p.m.

About SLONIP

Welcome to the SLONIP Website!

Water is vital for all known forms of life and is transported continuously through the different spheres of Earth with the water cycle: evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation, runoff etc. Stable (¹⁶O, ¹⁷O, ¹⁸O, ¹H, ²H) and radioactive (³H) isotopes are powerful tracers of the path of the water molecules in the water cycle from precipitation to surface and groundwater and further to drinking water supply. Therefore, isotopes are commonly used to characterize the source of water, its flow pathways or to quantify exchanges of water, solutes and particulates between hydrological compartments during different hydrological process.

Precipitation is of major interest in the hydrological cycle as it is the ultimate source of water to the catchments. Therefore, the importance of systematically collecting data on the water isotope composition of precipitation, particularly of the stable isotopes of oxygen (expressed as δ¹⁸O) and hydrogen (expressed as δ²H), is steadily increasing.

In Slovenia water isotopes in precipitation have been systematically monitored since 1981 only in Ljubljana. In 2000, the need for a much more refined understanding of isotope variations was identified. Therefore, a programme of collecting new data at a higher spatial density and temporal frequency in different parts of the country has been initiated and was extended several times during the past decades (Vreča & Malenšek, 2016). The number of sampling locations has grown to a countrywide network presented on this web-based interactive research platform (Vreča et al., 2022) as the Slovenian Network of Isotopes in Precipitation (SLONIP) and initiated by the Jožef Stefan Institute. The network is still not a part of a national monitoring programme, such as that operating in European countries, for example, ISOT module in Switzerland. However, we hope that one day it will be.

The SLONIP Website offers you information about:

• Stations where we perform (or was performed in the past) monitoring of isotopes in precipitation
• Data in numerical and graphical form and calculations of monthly, seasonal and annual means and LMWLs, all calculated using a Python code made freely available on GitHub (Pavšek & Vreča, 2022)
• Related papers, cooperating institutions and related web sites.

This Website is intended primarily for viewing the information collected. See short presentation at Vreča et al., 2022. If you are intend to use the information in any way, please let us know. See also Terms of Use for details.

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