The energy budget of a surface or an object is the amount of heat energy, in any form, that arrives at or departs from the surface of the object in a specified time period. Energy budget climatology most commonly is the climatology of the energy budgets of the Earth’s surface that are studied at a variety of scales. The term may also be broadened to include the energy budget of the atmosphere as a whole or any part of it. We will concentrate here mainly on the energy budget climatology of the Earth’s surface.
The energy budget of a surface is an application of the law of conservation of energy for the Earth’s surface. The most simple form of the law may be expressed as:
where Q* is net radiation, H is sensible heat (enthalpy), LE is latent heat (L being the latent heat of vaporization of water and E the amount of water evaporated), and Gis the flow into or from the submedium. Each term can be positive or negative. The net radiation term may be further broken into the component terms...
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Cross-references
Albedo and Reflectivity
Atmospheric Circulation, Global
Bioclimatology
Boundary Layer Climatology
Climatology
Dynamic Climatology
Greenhouse Effect and Greenhouse Gases
Radiation Laws
Solar Radiation
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Greenland, D. (2005). Energy Budget Climatology. In: Oliver, J.E. (eds) Encyclopedia of World Climatology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht . https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3266-8_76
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