How to increase wall insulation in CLMU

[wangly]

Hi,
I want to manually increase the wall insulation in CLMU to assess its impact on the building's space heating and air conditioning fluxes. In the paper by Oleson and Feddema (2020) (https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001586), it is mentioned that "For high latitude locations, insulation was added to walls to alleviate the deficiencies noted in Karsisto et al. (2015) (section 7.1)." I would like to learn how to represent well-insulated walls in CLMU. Should I manually modify the thermal conductivity (TK_WALL) and the volumetric heat capacity (CV_WALL) of the wall, or should I use specific tools for this purpose?

 

[Yuan Sun]

Hi Linying,

The urban parameters are read-in through the module src/biogeophys/UrbanParamsType.F90 in the CLM or CTSM.

You should modify the surface inputdata file （NETCDF）in your runs.

Best,
Yuan

 

[oleson]

Yuan is correct that you could modify the urban parameters such as TK_WALL, CV_WALL in the surface dataset (the file pointed to by fsurdat in your lnd_in). It is probably easiest to modify these parameters manually using software capable of modifying netcdf files. If you want to do more complicated things, for example, create new wall types for different regions, you might look at the Urban Properties Tool:

GitHub - NCAR/THESISUrbanPropertiesTool

Contribute to NCAR/THESISUrbanPropertiesTool development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[wangly]

Thanks for the helpful suggestion, @Yuan Sun and @oleson. Do you have any specific recommendations for setting parameters for well-insulated walls, such as adjusting only the first layer or all layers of TK_WALL and CV_WALL, and any suggested values for these settings?

 

[oleson]

You could look at mat_prop.csv in the urban properties tool for insulation values and references, and lam_spec.csv to see how walls/roof with insulation are constructed.

 

[wangly]

Thanks for your suggestion and expertise. I greatly appreciate it.