On the use of field measurements of energy fluxes to evaluate land surface models

Eddy covariance (EC) is the generally preferred technique today for measuring energy and mass fluxes of vegetated surfaces, with many experimental sites now established in the global Fluxnet network. A fundamental problem with EC, violating the principle of energy conservation, is that energy balances determined using EC are generally “unclosed”, with combined sensible and latent heat fluxes commonly underestimating available energy by 20% or …