Limitations and improvements of the energy balance closure with reference to experimental data measured over a maize field

The use of energy fluxes data to validate land surface models requires that energy balance closure conservation is satisfied, but usually this condition is not verified when the available energy is bigger than the sum of turbulent vertical fluxes. In this work, a comprehensive evaluation of energy balance closure problems is performed on a 2012 data set from Livraga obtained by a micrometeorological eddy covariance station located in a maize field in the Po Valley. Energy balance closure is calculated by statistical regression of turbulent energy fluxes and soil heat flux against available energy. Generally, the results indicate a lack of closure with a mean imbalance in the order of 20%. Storage terms are the main reason for the unclosed energy balance but also the turbulent mixing conditions play a fundamental role in reliable turbulent flux estimations. Recently introduced in literature, the energy balance problem has been studied as a scale problem. A representative source area for each flux of the energy balance has been analyzed and the closure has been performed in function of turbulent flux footprint areas. Surface heterogeneity and seasonality effects have been studied to 336 understand the influence of canopy growth on the energy balance closure. High frequency data have been used to calculate co-spectral and ogive functions, which suggest that an averaging period of 30 min may miss temporal scales that contribute to the turbulent fluxes. Finally, latent and sensible heat random error estimations are computed to give information about the measurement system and turbulence transport deficiencies.