2.3 Water and Energy Budget Partitioning
The amount of energy going into the system should be offset by the amount of energy used by the system; therefore, the net radiation into the system should be accounted for by the total heat fluxes of the system:
\(Rn-G=LE+H+i\) Eq. 1
where Rn is the net radiation, LE is the latent heat,H is the sensible heat, and i is the source/sink term with all components in W/m2. We conducted an energy balance closure on all three water years. We considered errors less than 30% to represent good closure; that our observations resulted in a 30% closure error or less, meaning at least 70% of the net radiation is accounted for by ground, sensible, and latent fluxes. Given that we are not measuring the thermal energy in the snowpack, of the water that pools on the surface just after snowmelt, of the vegetation canopy or canopy airspace or other energy exchange processes along with the atmospheric complexities of mountain environments (Finnigan, 2004), 30% is a realistic closure estimate. This closure percentage is consistent with previous riparian and mountain area studies that resulted in closure errors of 10 to 30 percent (Eshonkulov et al., 2019; Nagler et al., 2005; Scott et al., 2004; Scott et al., 2008; Wilson et al., 2002).