WRF-Hydro® v5.1.1

Abstract

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. For backwards compatibility with older versions of WRF-Hydro, users specifying a spatial soil parameter file (in namelist.hrldas -&gt; noahlsm_offline -&gt; 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": <code>ncap2 -O -s "rsurfexp=slope*0.0+5.0" soil_properties.nc soil_properties.nc</code> 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 <code>smc smcmax</code> 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