Minutes, Meeting July 13, 2006
Present: Dennis, Ted, Laura
Subject: VIC model modifications
Issues to address:
 Rumors of errors (water/energy balance, crashes) cropping up when running lake simulations
 Consistency of code base
 VIC doesn't simulate the wetland water table depth
 Energy fluxes within soil beneath lakes are not currently handled the same way as for non-inundated soils
 Soil moisture in the wetland is independent of the lake level
 Lakes need to be able to inundate any/all of a grid cell's veg types
 The independence of the lake area and grid cell's saturated area *might* be problematic as well
Tasks:
 Ted will talk to all users of the lake model and
a) make sure the code is the same among all the user's copies
b) investigate any errors
 Laura will make sure that energy fluxes beneath lakes are computed properly.
 Laura has a student working on the water table parameterization already. Since this can be handled
independently of the other issues, Laura and her student will continue working on this feature (for the
current case of lakes interacting only with a single wetland vegetation class). This parameterization
should somehow relate the soil moisture content in the wetland to the lake level.
 Ted will work on allowing lakes to inundate any/all of a grid cell's veg types. The method used here to tie
together the lake fraction in each veg type should ideally be something that can be generalized to work
with lakes that span multiple grid cells (and multiple elevation bands, while we're at it).
 Ted may (if it looks necessary) try to tie the water table and lake level to the VIC curve so that lake area
corresponds to saturated area.