snow_depth seems not to be decreased when the snowpack melts, for snow packs without explicit layers
- Dominant language
- Fortran
- Stars
- 352
- Forks
- 361
- Avg merge
- 2d 21h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 7
Description
### Brief summary of bug
From tracing snow_depth through the code, I can't see anywhere where it is decreased when the snowpack melts. I expected to see such a decrease somewhere.
### General bug information
**CTSM version you are using:** ctsm1.0.dev074
**Does this bug cause significantly incorrect results in the model's science?** Yes (if it's actually a bug)
**Configurations affected:** All
### Details of bug
I'm not sure that this is actually a bug, but it seems suspicious to me and I'd like to get feedback from others. There are places where snow_depth is set to 0 (when the snowpack completely vanishes), and snow_depth is also recalculated in CombineSnowLayers, but other than that I can't find anywhere where snow_depth is decreased when the snowpack melts.
I expected to find code to decrease snow_depth in SnowCoverFractionSwensonLawrence2012Mod:UpdateSnowDepthAndFrac, but it looks like snow_depth can only *increase* there.
Contributor guide
Assessment
This issue has not been assessed yet.