Version 5.1.2 of the Community WRF-Hydro® modeling system is a bug-fix release that corrects several small but critical errors in version 5.1.1:
- Water class value for output masking is now set to the appropriate water class code instead of being hard-coded to "16". (Addresses issue #455)
- WRF-Hydro can now be linked to versions of netCDF newer than v4.6 without crashing. (Addresses issue #382)
Beyond these fixes, no additional answer-changing modifications are present, nor are different configuration or input forcing files required from version 5.1.1.
Version 5.1.1 of the Community WRF-Hydro® source code is consistent with the NOAA National Water Model (NWM) v2.0 code in operations plus the following additions and fixes:
- Lakes in the NCAR reach configuration:
- When running the NCAR Reach configuration, Lakes will now work as expected (similarly to the NWM configuration).
- Compound channel:
- In order to represent a simplification of the behavior of a flood wave when it exceeds the channel bank, a compound channel formulation was added to the NWM code.
- The compound channel formulation is currently only functional in the NWM configuration.
- RSURF_EXP parameter exposed in MPTABLE.TBL:
- The previously hard coded soil shape function exponent parameter in Noah-MP was added to the MPTABLE.TBL parameter table as RSURF_EXP and spatial soil parameter file as rsurfexp.
- The parameter RSURF_EXP controls the shape of the rsurf resistance curve as it relates to soil moisture: lower rsurfexp will result in higher resistance for a given soil moisture and hence less soil evaporation, higher rsurfexp will result in lower resistance and more soil evaporation.
- Backwards Incompatibility: for backwards compatibility with older versions of WRF-Hydro, users specifying a spatial soil parameter file (in namelist.hrldas -> noahlsm_offline -> spatial_filename) will need to update this file. The file can be updated, for example, by the following NCO command where the existing file is named "soil_properties.nc":
ncap2 -O -s "rsurfexp=slope*0.0+5.0" soil_properties.nc soil_properties.nc
- BATS albedo parameters were exposed in MPTABLE.TBL
- The maximum snow water equivalent was changed to 5000mm
- Bug fix to snow liquid water movement
- Broader usage of the netCDF4/HDF5 format:
- NetCDF3 outputs were converted to NetCDF4 and the compile time option for large file support was removed.
- Enhanced testing (additional model configurations and tests)
- Output: additional direct and diffuse snow albedo variables and minor updates to output file metadata
- Makefiles no longer generate intermediate preprocessed source files, which eases debugging (line numbers displayed will now match actual line numbers in the source code), and permits compilation on case-insensitive file systems (such as those used with macOS)
- Bugfix to reservoir physics:
- The uniform lake surface area was set to be consistent with the vertical wall assumption.
- Qlateral inputs were “zeroed out” for reach-based methods PR #161
- Bugfix - soil moisture check:
- The
smc smcmax
check threshold was reduced from 10-6 to 10-5 due to some conflicts still triggering at the lower threshold. PR #111 -
- Bugfix - runoff mapping: Surface runoff that was mapped through groundwater (GW) buckets in non-UDMP configurations now behaves as pass-through only PR #306
- The
- Gridded routing lake inflows were not preserved in restarts, therefore solution to the level-pool scheme on intial timestep after model restart had slightly different initial conditions. This was fixed by preserving last timestep lake inflows in the restart files.
- The lake level-pool scheme had a number of internal bugs fixed, which should improve lake level and outflow behavior.
- Hard-coded values for minutes and seconds in output metadata were removed to allow for correct sub-hourly outputs.
- Minor updates to model testing
- Minor updates to model testing
- New capability to aggregate and route flow with user-defined mapping over NHDPLUS catchments and reaches
- New capability to specify key hydrologic and vegetation parameters in 2 dimensions (and 3 in the case of soil properties)
- New Noah-MP surface resistance formulation that improves snowpack simulation
- Updates to Noah-MP infiltration scheme to better handle high intensity rainfall events in fast-draining soils
- Significant improvements to model output routines, including full CF compliance, new capabilities for applying internal scale/offset and compression to reduce file sizes, and built-in coordinate information to allow outputs to be read natively in GIS environments
- New capability for streamflow nudging data-assimilation for the Muskingum-Cunge method
- New capability for engineering and regression testing is now available for WRF-Hydro. More information can be found here.
The hydro.namelist and namelist.hrldas files used to control model run options have changed. The existing v3.0 namelists should be replaced with the new files in the /template directory in the tarball. The major changes are specified below.
- A new 2-dimensional file option for specifying hydrologic terrain routing parameters (HYDROTBL_F), which allows these parameter to be freely distributed across the domain as opposed to tied to a lookup table.
- The option to provide a Geospatial land metadata file (LAND_SPATIAL_META_FLNM) to write out CF compliant files. This can be generated by the WRF-Hydro ArcGIS Pre-Processing Toolkit under “Build Spatial Metadata file”. Note: any spatial metadata file created before November, 2016 will need to be re-created due to an added attribute in the x/y variables. If this file is not provided, the output will not be CF compliant but the model will still run.
- io_form_outputs option: file outputs can now provide flexibility in the format of output (compressed, scale factor/add offset, etc.).
- The io_config_outputs option is used for switching between different predefined output variable sets
- New option to differentiate channel inflow components into surface and groundwater bucket model contributions in the model output (output_channelBucket_influx).
- New capability to specify distinct timesteps for channel (DTRT_CH) and terrain (DTRT_TER) routing modules.
- The UDMP_OPT and associated udmap_file option for allowing user-defined mapping such as the NHDPlus network used in the National Water Model (NWM).
- New options to support streamflow nudging data assimilation.
- frxst_pts_out: An option to turn on and off forecast points for gridded routing has been created. When frxstpts = 1 AND the user has specified frxstpts in the Fulldom_hires file generation (using the WRF-Hydro GIS Pre-processing Tool), then a
frxstpts_out.txt
file will be generated. - CHANOBS_DOMAIN: An option to output frxstpts in netCDF format has been created. Control this option by specifying the CHANOBS = 1 (will output) and CHANOBS = 0 (off). The CHANOBS file will output streamflow at the frxstpts specified in the
Fulldom_hires.nc
file. - output_gw: GW files can be output independently.
- The RTOUT files now have geospatial metadata appended, making it much easier to work with these files in GIS.
- New option to specify key vegetation and surface properties in 2 dimensions and soil properties in 3 dimensions. This allows much more user flexibility in how these parameters are assigned and calibrated.
- Specification (dependency) of the geogrid file has been removed
- The supplemental domain parameter files are new or have updates since the last release:
wrfinput_d0x.nc
,soil_properties.nc
, andhydro2dtbl.nc
- New
soil_properties.nc
file, which can be created using the provided R scriptcreate_soilProperties.R
. Note: thesoil_properties.nc
file is only active (and required) if the SPATIAL_SOIL compile option is selected. If the compile option is set to 0, the model will read fromSOILPARM.TBL
. The creation of this file has a dependency on “R” and several of its libraries. - The model can now read a
hydro2dtbl.nc
file (HYDROTBL_F) instead of theHYDRO.TBL
file, which enables easy manipulation of parameters. The model will create one for you if it is not provided, or if you use the R script to generate thesoil_properties.nc
file, it will also create thehydro2dtbl.nc
file. - Changes to the
wrfinput_d0x.nc
file to ensure consistency between the geogrid and the initial land surface model states. A newwrfinput_d0x.nc
file is required due to some variable changes and can be generated using thecreate_Wrfinput.R
script. Note: the v3.0 shell script for creating thewrfinput_d0x.nc
file from the geogrid file will not work for v5; use the v5 script provided on the WRF-Hydro website. The creation of this file has a dependency on “R” and the “netCDF4” library. This script is currently only compatible with the Noah-MP land surface model. - The water and urban land cover type flags are now read from geogrid file global attributes, allowing flexibility to use classification systems other than the previously supported USGS (e.g., MODIS).
- For gridded routing (channel_option = 3) or Muskingum-Cunge routing with user-defined mapping active (channel_option = 2 and UDMP_OPT = 1), a LAKEPARM file can now be read in either in .TBL format or .nc format. The WRF-Hydro GIS Pre-processing Toolkit will generate either or both. Note that variable names have changed and to convert to the new format, use the
convert_LAKEPARM_to_V5.0.sh
script available on the website. Note: that lakes will not run at this time using reach-based routing (channel_option=2) unless paired with user-defined mapping (UDMP_OPT=1). Namelist checks will prevent users from running with a LAKEPARM supplied and channel_option=2 selected.
- The model now reads in netCDF versions of the GWBUCKPARM file and
gw_basins_geogrid.txt
file. These are required for running groundwater (GWBASESWCRT options 1 and 2). The WRF-Hydro GIS Pre-processing Toolkit can generate these files using a tool in the Utilities called “Build GWBUCKPARM Table”: See details in the WRF-Hydro GIS Pre-processing Toolkit documentation for options for how to generate this file.
- A bug in the gridded lake code was fixed to properly translate inflows and outflows.
- An error in the calculation of the trapezoidal celerity for Muskingum-Cunge was corrected.
- An error in soil moisture accounting in the subsurface flow module was fixed.
- Accumulated variables in a few locations in the code were converted to single timestep accounting to minimize machine truncation errors on large values.
- Fixed issue with energy calculations that was leading to above freezing temperatures for very shallow snowpacks.