depths of levsoi (as opposed to levgrnd)

[thoar]

I'm using an out-of-the-box configuration of CLM (clm5.0.34) and have trolled through the documentation and restart and history files and cannot determine the depths of the variables declared to use 'levsoi' as their vertical coordinate. 'levgrnd' has 25 layers, and there is a coordinate variable that defines them. The 'levsoi' dimension is 20, and if I read between the lines section 2.2.2.1 of the CLM5 Technical Note:

2.2.2.1. Soil Layers​

The soil column can be discretized into an arbitrary number of layers. The default vertical discretization (Table 2.2.3) uses

layers, of which

are hydrologically and biogeochemically active. The deepest 5 layers are only included in the thermodynamical calculations (Lawrence et al. 2008) described in Chapter 2.6.

the 'shallowest' 20 layers of the levgrnd coordinate variable are probably the correct depths to use when trying to interpret variables dimensioned with 'levsoi' ... is this correct?

Thanks -- Tim

 

[thoar]

And the 'levdcmp' dimension is also 25 ... do I use 'levgrnd' levels for those variables as well?

 

[oleson]

Yes to both of those questions.
A single exception is that levdcmp could be 1 (single level) if use_vertsoilc = .false. There might be some older model configurations which use that.

 

[thoar]

Thanks Keith.

 

[acgvar]

Wow, I really appreciate this discussion. I was curious as well.