In a Small Mountain Valley in Northern Utah, A Fellow Tried to Teach Me about Making and Interpreting Measurements of Energy Balance.

Over the years marking my journey in science and academics, I had to learn and relearn many things about observing nature. While a young and naïve novice, my karma took me to Logan. I believed then I was already capable of conducting in a proper way the types of measurements needed to construct the apparently simple energy balance of a surface. This was not quite the case, as I learned over the ensuing years. I was fortunate to have the destiny to arrive next to Campbell Scientific and especially Bert Tanner. In the past 27 years I had too few but still priceless interactions with this singular individual, and was sometimes shown the error of my ways. This knowledge was transmitted in various venues. More often than not while drinking beer, usually while attending scientific meetings. The dialogues were always flavored by the appearance of various traits of his character including diplomacy, lack of diplomacy, arrogance, his deep passion for science, seriousness, and yes humor. So how does what I learned, impact my present views? Much of what many of us study involves the energy balance equation, seductively simple and elegant looking, but only disguising many demons of nonlinearity that reside underneath. At some point we are limited by how accurately we can quantify the size of the key processes, which means measurements. Here I cover a little of the story of how well we can and cannot measure turbulence fluxes of mass and energy, and reconcile them with the estimates of available energy. What are the various sources of uncertainty? What are the implications for some key issues we address? I became aware in a deeper way of many of these concepts through the discourse with Bertrand Tanner that I was privileged to have experienced.