Hydrology Modeling - Energy Budget
If you have never used the Web Modeling Tool, learn how to use it here. The WMT allows you to set up simulations, but once you are ready to run them, you will need an account on the CSDMS supercomputer to submit your job.
More information on getting an account can be found here HPCC Access
This lab is the first in a series of hydrology labs. These labs use TOPOFLOW components to simulate basic hydrological processes such as the energy budget, precipitation, snowmelt, evaporation, infiltration etc.
These TOPOFLOW components are designed to be coupled and to model water runoff in a landscape, i.e. in a 'spatially-distributed' hydrological model.
Lecture notes discuss variation of incoming radiation with latitude and time of the year (download the presentation slides here).
In this lab focus is on the solar radiation for a given watershed. We will model incoming radiation and look at the effect of watershed morphometric properties: slope and aspect.
Learning objectives
- relation between temperature incoming solar radiation
- importance of watershed slope, aspect
Key concepts
- Stefan-Boltzmann Law
- Geometric relationship between Earth's tilt, day of year and local slope, aspect
Based on the presentation slides work on the following problem:
What would be the mean annual temperature of Earth if the present albedo (roughly 0.3) would increase to 0.4?
Lab Notes
>> Open a new browser window and open the Web Modeling Tool WMT with hydrology components
>> For this Energy Budget exercise we will start out with an example called 'HydrologyLab_EnergyBalance1'
.
>> The Meteorology Component will now be active in the WMT. You can browse through the Parameter List and learn how this simulation is set up. This is an basic run for a watershed in Kentucky, called Beaver Creek.
The watershed slopes, and aspects have been pre-calculated from a 1108 rows by 1207 columns DEM for this region.
We will calculate the meteorological conditions (with most of the parameters set by just single values). Our run calculates the pattern of incoming radiation for March 1st, for 12 hours.
Once you have explored the input, you have to save this configuration as a personal example. Then, you can run it by hitting the arrow run button. This way you generate a job script that can be submitted to Beach-the CSDMS High Performance Computing System. Provide your Beach account information (i.e. user name and password) to get the run started. The status page allows you to keep track of a simulation. From the status page you can eventually download your output files.
