ESCOMP / ESCOMP/CTSM

Hillslope hydrology may need changes to work correctly for virtual vegetated landunits

Open
#1,805 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
Fortran
Stars
352
Forks
361
Avg merge
2d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
7

Description

In discussions with @swensosc , we're not sure if the hillslope hydrology code will work correctly for virtual (zero-weight but active) vegetated landunits. As noted here https://github.com/ESCOMP/CTSM/pull/1715#discussion_r872752931

> The multiplication by col%wtgcell to create volumetric quantities highlights a potential issue here that we should at least discuss and possibly fix: I took pains a number of years ago to ensure that a zero-weight (virtual) vegetated landunit would operate effectively the same as a non-zero-weight landunit. This is needed for the glacier coupling and other aspects of dynamic landunits. Multiplying by col%wtgcell *might* be a problem in this respect. I think it depends on how these terms (stream_water_volume, qstreamflow, stream_water_depth and anything they affect) are used in the code. If they are just used for diagnostic purposes and to send gridcell average quantities to ROF, then I think this is fine. But if they feed back onto the column or landunit-level behavior of anything else in CTSM, then I think this is a problem: in this case, I'm thinking that a vegetated landunit that has zero weight on the gridcell would operate fundamentally differently because col%wtgcell would be exactly 0 for all of its columns, so these other terms would be exactly 0. So if these terms feed back onto other behavior, then I think we'll need to change the way these are specified so that they are on a per-area basis (like most other variables in the model).

This at least needs more thought, and may end up requiring some code changes to make this work right.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.