Systematic Tendency Error in Budget Calculations

Abstract

Atmospheric budget calculations suffer from various observational and numerical errors. This paper demonstrates that all budget calculations applied to a large number of samples suffer from additional errors originating from systematic tendency errors of the budget equation used. Quantitative evaluation of this systematic tendency error for various types of budget computations showed that the systematic tendency errors are generally comparable in magnitude to the leading terms in the budget equations. Because of this error, the calculated budget does not satisfy conservation properties under steady conditions.