Co-Chair: Norman Loeb
Co-Chair: Martin Wild

The working Group on the Global Energy balance was founded in 2009.

Objectives:

The main goals of this working group are the assessment of the magnitude and uncertainties of the components of the global energy balance, their decadal changes and underlying causes as well as their significance for other climate system components and climate change.

The working group, comprised of members who produce, disseminate and analyze surface and satellite data products relevant to the study of the Earth’s energy balance, will also serve as a forum to discuss to what extent the datasets currently available to the scientific community are adequate for advancing the state of knowledge on the Earth’s energy balance. Where appropriate, the working group will make recommendations highlighting areas where further work is needed (e.g., new datasets, new observations, etc.)

In order to achieve these goals, key responsibilities of the working group will be:

• Foster, coordinate and conduct research on the components of the global energy balance and their decadal changes at the TOA, surface and within the atmosphere. Combine surface-based and satellite information to reassess the global mean energy balance, and ultimatively provide a complete picture of the 4 dimensional spatio-temporal evolution of surface, atmospheric and TOA energy balances.
• Foster and coordinate the establishment and dissemination of the necessary space-born and ground-based datasets and modeling approaches, as an internationally coordinated service to the scientific community.
• Interact with researchers in other domains in need of energy balance data (e.g. climate modelers, hydrologists, glaciologists, carbon cycle modelers, phenologists) to assess their requirements and advise on the data usage.
• Provide better constraints for the energy balance in climate models, particularly in view of the forthcoming IPCC AR5 report.