WRF-Hydro® v5.1.1

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.
  • 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