Impacts of Climate Change and Land Use Changes on Land Surface Radiation and Energy Budgets

Land surface radiation and energy budgets are critical to address a variety of scientific and application issues related to climate trends, weather predictions, hydrologic and biogeophysical modeling, and the monitoring of ecosystem health and agricultural crops. This is an introductory paper to the special issue of land surface radiation and energy budgets from an international conference on this subject. The temporal trends of these components are first discussed in the context of climate change and human induced land use changes. After a brief introduction to the conference, results from each paper of this special issue are summarized.