(Press-News.org) ALBANY, N.Y. (Sept. 25, 2025) — Researchers at the University at Albany are exploring a new method to improve weather and climate forecasts that relies on a tiny but powerful assistant — stable water isotopes.
Water isotopes are the naturally occurring variations of hydrogen and oxygen atoms within water molecules. Isotopes have slightly different masses but the same chemical properties, acting like fingerprints that reveal information about a sample’s origin and history.
By measuring differences in isotope masses in rainfall, snow, or even ice, scientists can trace where moisture came from, how it traveled, and the weather conditions it experienced along the way.
Sarah Lu, research faculty at UAlbany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, is leading a three-year, $855,162 project funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to integrate water isotopes into NOAA’s Unified Forecast System.
The project is supported by a team of researchers from NOAA, UAlbany and Boston College.
“As natural tracers of moisture exchange, water isotopes provide a unique view into the water cycle across time scales,” said Lu, the project’s principal investigator. “Their tiny mass differences allow scientists to track water movement, including precipitation, and better understand related processes. Our goal is to use these isotopic tracers to study hydrological processes and their uncertainties, which could significantly improve weather predictions.”
The Unified Forecast System (UFS) is an open-source, community-based Earth modeling system, designed as both a research tool and to support weather and climate forecasting. It is designed to unify NOAA's diverse and complex forecasting systems into a single framework.
Over the next three years, Lu’s team will create a tool that integrates existing water isotope measurements into the UFS. The isotope measurements were recently collected in liquid and vapor phases from ground stations, aircraft, ships and satellites.
The research team is developing the new tool to investigate precipitation and other hydrological processes, with a focus on extreme events such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a tropical climate pattern that drives rainfall around the globe, atmospheric rivers and the North American monsoon.
Their findings and water isotope datasets will be shared with the broader UFS community.
“This new tool will allow scientists to use the UFS to diagnose and investigate precipitation and hydrological processes,” said Lu. “By adding this capability, we can better study extreme precipitation events and thus improve our weather prediction models.”
Yi Ming, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College, is partnering with Lu as the project’s co-principal investigator.
Other UAlbany researchers involved with the project include Scott Miller and Shih-Wei Wei of the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center and Mathias Vuille and Zhiqiang Lyu of the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences.
The project will also support a graduate student researcher and two early-career scientists.
END
UAlbany Atmospheric scientists awarded $855K NOAA grant for water isotope research
2025-09-25
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