AGU Chapman Conference

This Chapman Conference focuses on the longstanding questions surrounding the lack of closure of the surface energy budget that has plagued the eddy-covariance (EC) community for decades. Pressing socioenvironmental issues such as population growth, land-use changes, and climate change are exerting increasing demands on Earth system models to provide decision support and guide mitigation and adaptation for sustaining both human and ecosystem health. However, the imperfect energy balance closure of EC measurements introduces uncertainty into the algorithms, calibrations, and validation of these models that can propagate into the model output and impact policy decisions and stakeholder confidence in the results. Therefore, there is an urgent need to bring together the community to address the causes of non-closure, potential corrections, and broader implications for subsequent analyses such as the calibration and validation of water, energy, and carbon balance models.