Energy and water closure

Abstract

Energy and water budget closure has recently been extensively used to assess the consistency of precipitation products with various other terms of the water and energy budget. Most efforts are focused on water closure and explore regional scales. These studies reveal the difficulty of closing the regional water budget with the current generation of satellite and/or reanalysis products. The addition of energy constraints on the water budget allows us to enforce the closure and shows more consistent results of optimized observations. At the global scale, fewer studies have been conducted. They tend to show that only a handful of precipitation products are consistent with the radiation budget at this scale. The major recommendation of this chapter is to elaborate on the characterization of uncertainty of the precipitation product to better serve the energy and water closure study.