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).