Development of a new methane tracer: kinetic isotope effect of ¹³CH₃D + OH from 278 to 313 K

Abstract

Abstract. Methane is the second most important long lived greenhouse gas and impacts the oxidative capacity of the Earth's atmosphere. Nontheless there are significant uncertainties in its source budget. Analysis of the isotopic composition of atmospheric methane, including doubly substituted species (e.g. 13CH3D), offers new constraints on the methane source budget as the sources and sinks have distinct isotopic signatures. The most important sink of atmospheric methane is oxidation by OH which accounts for around 90 % of methane removal in the troposphere. Here we present experimentally derived methane + OH kinetic isotope effects and their temperature dependence over the range of 278 to 313 K for CH3D and 13CH3D; the latter is reported here for the first time. We find kCH4/kCH3D=1.31 ± 0.01 and kCH4/k13CH3D = 1.34 ± 0.03 at room temperature, implying that the methane + OH kinetic isotope effect is multiplicative such that (kCH4/k13CH4)(kCH4/kCH3D) = kCH4/k13CH3D to within the experimental uncertainty. In addition the kinetic isotope effect were characterized using transition state theory with tunneling correction. Good agreement between the experimental, quantum chemical and available literature values was obtained. The theoretical calculations show that 13CH3D isotope effects is the product of D- and 13C-isotope effect. Based on the results we conclude that the OH reaction at steady-state can produce an atmospheric clumped isotope signal (Δ(13CH3D) = ln([CH4][13CH3D]/[13CH4][CH3D])) of 0.02 ± 0.02.