The NOAA Air Resources Laboratory Surface Energy Budget Network

The Surface Energy Budget Network (SEBN) is a NOAA research network focused on terrestrial surface-atmosphere exchange. SEBN provides routine measurements of the components net radiation, and how that energy is partitioned into sensible, latent and ground fluxes. The measurements also provide insight into the seasonal and annual water and carbon budgets over regionally representative land surface types across the continental United states. Currently, NOAA has four operational SEBN sites, but over the course of the history of the SEBN, the network has included 10 different sites. Data from all the sites are still used. The currently-active sites include 1) Chestnut Ridge near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at which there is a 60 m walk-up tower in a deciduous forest representative of the Southeast US that includes nearly 20 years of meteorological and flux measurements within and above a temperate, broadleaf forest canopy, 2) an agricultural site at Bondville in southern Illinois with 20+ years of continuous measurements, 3) a semi-arid grassland site at Audubon in southeastern Arizona at which fluxes and meteorological gradients have been sampled along a 10-m tower since 2002 and 4) another semi-arid grassland site at Table Mountain, near Boulder, CO that has recently been established as well. Measurements from these sites are used to 1) improve our understanding of the critical land surface process that control the seasonal and annual water and carbon dioxide budgets over different ecotones, impact of extreme climate events on these fluxes and their long-term trends, 2) assist in model evaluation and verification, and 3) help refine surface-layer parameterizations for heat and moisture exchange for use in numerical weather prediction models and 4) provide validation data for new satellite derived energy fluxes that are being used in hydrologic studies. By measuring the diurnal, seasonal, and inter-annual variability of the “breathing of the biosphere,” the SEBN contributes to our understanding of the relationship between weather, climate, and terrestrial ecosystems, and provides data that can be used to improve NOAA’s forecast models.