Once water is introduced to the system as precipitation, the available energy, specifically solar radiation, exerts a major control on the movement of water in the land phase of the hydrologic cycle. Processes that are greatly affected by temperature and solar radiation include snow fall, snow melt and evaporation. Since evaporation is the primary water removal mechanism in the watershed, the energy inputs become very important in reproducing or simulating an accurate water balance.

A number of basic concepts related to the earth's orbit around the sun are required by the model to make solar radiation calculations. This section summarizes these concepts. Iqbal (1983) provides a detailed discussion of these and other topics related to solar radiation for users who require more information.

The mean distance between the earth and the sun is $1.496 X 10^8$ km and is called one astronomical unit (AU). The earth revolves around the sun in an elliptical orbit and the distance from the earth to the sun on a given day will vary from a maximum of 1.017 AU to a minimum of 0.983 AU. An accurate value of the earth-sun distance is important because the solar radiation reaching the earth is inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the sun. The distance is traditionally expressed in mathematical form as a Fourier series type of expansion with a number of coefficients. For most engineering applications a simple expression used by Duffie and Beckman (1980) is adequate for calculating the reciprocal of the square of the radius vector of the earth, also called the eccentricity correction factor, $E_0$, of the earth's orbit:

$E_0 = (r_0/r)^2 = 1+ 0.033 cos [(2\pi d_n /365)]$ 1:1.1.1

where $r_0$is the mean earth-sun distance (1 AU), r is the earth-sun distance for any given day of the year (AU), and $d_n$ is the day number of the year, ranging from 1 on January 1 to 365 on December 31. February is always assumed to have 28 days, making the accuracy of the equation vary due to the leap year cycle.

The radiant energy from the sun is practically the only source of energy that impacts climatic processes on earth. The solar constant, ISC, is the rate of total solar energy at all wavelengths incident on a unit area exposed normally to rays of the sun at a distance of 1 AU from the sun. Quantifying this value has been the object of numerous studies through the years. The value officially adopted by the Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation in October 1981 is

The amount of energy falling on a horizontal surface during a day is given by

or

When solar radiation enters the earth's atmosphere, a portion of the energy is removed by scattering and adsorption. The amount of energy lost is a function of the transmittance of the atmosphere, the composition and concentration of the constituents of air at the location, the path length the radiation travels through the air column, and the radiation wavelength.