Identification

Title

North American water and energy cycles

Abstract

Closure of the water and energy cycles for North America has been improved by combining several new data sets to provide an integrated view from 1979 to 2010. We use new global atmospheric reanalyses, top-of-atmosphere radiation, surface fluxes including evaporation E and precipitation P, streamflow and river discharge, and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment estimates of water storage and its tendency. The atmospheric moisture budget provides more reliable estimates and reproducible time series of E-P than separate estimates of E and P. The excess of P over E is greatest in winter largely because of changing evapotranspiration, whereas precipitation is largest in summer. The annual mean loss of energy to space of 33Wm-2 is compensated for nearly equally by transports of dry static energy and latent energy onto land. The annual cycle (amplitude of ~20Wm-2) of implied downward surface flux corresponds to changes in surface and soil temperatures and seasonal snowmelt.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d79s1rw0

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2013-01-28T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact