Dynamic response of the thermometric net radiometer

We computed the dynamic response of an idealized thermometric net radiometer, when driven by an oscillating net longwave radiation intended roughly to simulate rapid fluctuations of the radiative environment such as might be expected during field use of such devices. The study was motivated by curiosity as to whether non-linearity of the surface boundary conditions implies the existence of a non-vanishing mean signal even when mean forcing (i.e. mean net radiation) vanishes. These simulations do not prove (and owing to discretization and roundoff error, cannot prove) such a bias is absolutely non-existent, however they establish that the bias is of negligible practical importance, even for unrealistically large fluctuations in the net radiation. Other aspects of net radiometer design must account for the serious errors known to sometimes result (in the case of many devices), from field application of steady-state calibration factors.