Meaning of "(vegetated landunits only)" in the history fields?

[wadewei]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to understand some of the CLM4.5 and CLM5 simulation results. What does "(vegetated landunits only)" mean in the history fields?

Many of the output variables have this. For example:
H2OSOI:long_name = "volumetric soil water (vegetated landunits only)" ;
TSOI:long_name = "soil temperature (vegetated landunits only)" ;

I am mostly interested in soil temperature and water content of permafrost areas fwiw. If a specific grid point has some glaciated or urban areas, are these areas excluded when calculating and outputing these variables?

Thanks,
Wade

 

[oleson]

Yes, landunits such as lake, glacier, urban, and wetland are excluded from the variable output of H2OSOI and TSOI.
For example, the history field call for H2OSOI is:

call hist_addfld2d (fname='H2OSOI', units='mm3/mm3', type2d='levsoi', &
avgflag='A', long_name='volumetric soil water (vegetated landunits only)', &
ptr_col=this%h2osoi_vol_col, l2g_scale_type='veg')

The l2g_scale_type is specified as 'veg", which tells the subgrid averaging code to only include vegetated landunits when averaging up to the gridcell.