Development and evaluation of a suite of isotope reference gases for methane
in air

Sperlich, Peter; Uitslag, Nelly A. M.; Richter, Jürgen M.; Rothe, Michael; Geilmann, Heike; van der Veen, Carina; Röckmann, Thomas; Blunier, Thomas; Brand, Willi A.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-9-3717-2016

Articles | Volume 9, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-9-3717-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-9-3717-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 8

Research article

|

12 Aug 2016

Research article |

| 12 Aug 2016

Development and evaluation of a suite of isotope reference gases for methane in air

Peter Sperlich, Nelly A. M. Uitslag, Jürgen M. Richter, Michael Rothe, Heike Geilmann, Carina van der Veen, Thomas Röckmann, Thomas Blunier, and Willi A. Brand

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Final revised paper (published on 12 Aug 2016)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Jan 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Comments to “Development and evaluation of a suite of isotope reference gases for methane in air” by Sperlich et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 29 Feb 2016
- AC1: 'author's response', Peter Sperlich, 10 Jun 2016
RC2: 'Referee Comment', Ingeborg Levin, 23 Mar 2016
- AC2: 'author's response', Peter Sperlich, 10 Jun 2016
SC1: 'serious problems with 13C-calibration and uncertainty evaluation', Sergey Assonov, 31 Mar 2016
- AC3: 'author's response', Peter Sperlich, 10 Jun 2016

Short summary

Isotope measurements in atmospheric CH₄ are performed since more than 3 decades. However, standard gases to harmonize global measurements are not available to this day. We designed two methods to calibrate a suite of 8 CH₄ gases with a wide range in isotopic composition to the VPDB and VSMOW scales with high precision and accuracy. Synthetic air mixtures with ~2 ppm of calibrated CH₄ can be provided to the community by the ISOLAB of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany.