Energy exchanges are often dictated by the water content of the soil surface, the type of vegetation, and the prevailing climatic conditions. These are driven by the net radiation balance of the surface with partitioning of energy into sensible heat, soil heat flux, and latent heat fluxes. A series of multiple experiments have been conducted throughout the United States over a variety of surfaces, corn and soybean in the Midwest, rangeland and wheat in the southern Great Plains, and desert vegetation in the Southwest. These studies have all had similar instrumentation used to quantify the energy balance. Bowen ratio systems have been used in all studies and complimented with either 1-d or 3-d eddy correlation measurements. We have evaluated these data to compare different methods of describing the energy partitioning to determine if the ratio of sensible to latent heat can be described by simple models. One of the comparisons made has been to evaluate the variation in the Priestly-Taylor alpha function. These comparisons have been made for corn, soybean, rangeland grass, desert grasses, and honey mesquite dune. The surfaces represent the changes throughout a year. Understanding the dynamics of the energy balance provides insights into the potential effect of different management practices imposed by man.