WRF-Hydro® v5.3.0

Version 5.3.0 of the Community WRF-Hydro® source code is consistent with the NOAA National Water Model (NWM) v3.0 code in operations plus the following additions and fixes:

New features:

• Added impervious runoff scheme
• New new nexp spatial parameter
• Added option for Crocus snowpack/glacier model (see additional licensing terms)
• New channel option to bypass channel solver and output inflows
• New spatial snow parameters

Model physics fixes/updates:

• Array boundary fixes in channel routing
• Improved performance of nudging routines
• Correct minimum slope limit
• Corrected a situation where NaNs could be introduced in Muskingum-Cunge solver
• Moved SWE max limit to MPTABLE parameter
• Fixed energy NaNs over large snowpacks
• Miscellaneous RFC Reservoir fixes
• Moved overland roughness calculation outside of time-dependent disaggregation
• Improvements of Xinanjiang soil moisture scheme
• Added ‘scrape’ to domain edge so water doesn’t accumulate non-physically

Updated coupling infrastructure:

• Updated WRF coupling
• Updated NUOPC Cap coupling

Code-level updates that do not affect model physics:

• Removed unnecessary, harmless error messages
• Updated makefile targets to include debug, install, and test
• Removed dependency on Dask from automated tests
• Update other dependencies in testing to newest versions

WRF-Hydro® v5.2.0

Version 5.2.0 of the Community WRF-Hydro® source code is consistent with the NOAA National Water Model (NWM) v2.1 code in operations plus the following additions and fixes:

• Added snow-related vars to retrospective output configuration
• Added SFCFRNOFF output flag tied to overland runoff switch
• Support GNU Fortran (gfortran) version 10.x and 11.x
• Added missing crop and soil NoahMP namelist options
• Removed deprecated namelist options for Reach-Lakes configuration
• Fixed issues with using gridded domains with very small dimensions
• Added ISLAKE mask flag to relevant NoahMP code
• Updated NUOPC cap component with improved MPI support and to read and write restarts
• Updated default channel parameters for gridded configuration
• Performance improvements to channel network initialization
• Added global title attribute to all output netCDF files
• Updated namelist templates

WRF-Hydro® v5.2.0

This is a pre-release of the WRF-Hydro® Modeling System version 5.2.0. This version corresponds to version 2.1 of the National Water Model. Once release assets are finalized (not included with this pre-release), a final release will be published with links to updated official documentation.

NOTE: This is a pre-release and not yet officially supported by the WRF-Hydro team. Please stand by for a final release soon!

WRF-Hydro® v5.1.2

Version 5.1.2 of the Community WRF-Hydro® modeling system is a bug-fix release that corrects several small but critical errors in version 5.1.1:

• Water class value for output masking is now set to the appropriate water class code instead of being hard-coded to "16". (Addresses issue #455)

• WRF-Hydro can now be linked to versions of netCDF newer than v4.6 without crashing. (Addresses issue #382)

Beyond these fixes, no additional answer-changing modifications are present, nor are different configuration or input forcing files required from version 5.1.1.

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

WRF-Hydro v5.1.1-beta

This is a beta release of WRF-Hydro v5.1.1 to support the upcoming training.

WRF-Hydro v5.0.3

This minor release contains several user relevant bug fixes to WRF-Hydro detailed below.

Bug fixes

• Gridded routing lake inflows were not preserved in restarts, therefore solution to the level-pool scheme on intial timestep after model restart had slightly different initial conditions. This was fixed by preserving last timestep lake inflows in the restart files.
• The lake level-pool scheme had a number of internal bugs fixed, which should improve lake level and outflow behavior.
• Hard-coded values for minutes and seconds in output metadata were removed to allow for correct sub-hourly outputs

WRF-Hydro v5.0.2

This release only includes additional testing upgrades to v5.0. No changes have been made to the model code.

NOTE This release, and all previous releases on this branch, DO NOT pass perfect restarts for Gridded due to a number of issues with the lake code. Additionally, NWM channel-only is not functional for any releases on this branch

NOTE The domain was updated on 2018-09-18 to fix incorrect namelist settings for aggfactrt and dxrt related to issue #174

NOTE The domain was updated on 2018-10-18 to re-do spinup. There may have been issues with the original restarts in this domain, but not certain.

WRF-Hydro v5.0.1

This release is a minor release that only includes updates to model testing modules. No changes have been made to the WRF-Hydro source code.

WRF-Hydro v5.0.0

Due to the significant number of updates since the previous WRF-Hydro v3.0 release, users with existing domain and setup files will need to adapt some files to be read by the new code. The significant updates and delayed release are attributed to the merging of the WRF-Hydro community model code base with the National Water Model (NWM) code base to provide access to many of the features of the NWM. Details regarding WRF-Hydro changes can be found here.

Below are some high level highlights of major changes. More information can also be found in the WRF-Hydro documentation available here on our project website.

• New capability to aggregate and route flow with user-defined mapping over NHDPlus catchments and reaches
• New capability to specify key hydrologic and vegetation parameters in 2 dimensions (and 3 in the case of soil properties).
• New Noah-MP surface resistance formulation that improves snowpack simulation.
• Updates to Noah-MP infiltration scheme to better handle high intensity rainfall events in fast-draining soils.
• Significant improvements to model output routines, including full CF compliance, new capabilities for applying internal scale/offset and compression to reduce file sizes, and built-in coordinate information to allow outputs to be read natively in GIS environments.
• New capability for streamflow nudging data-assimilation for the Muskingum-Cunge method.
• New capability for engineering and regression testing is now available for WRF-Hydro. More information can be found here.