ACSNOW not in WRFout

[William.Hatheway]

From @kwerner

Hi,
If you're looking at a case that only had snowfall (no liquid precipitation), then you can use the value of RAINC + RAINNC because these equal total convective and non-convective precipitation (including snow and ice). Otherwise, yes, I believe ACSNOW would be the way to go. It is initialized to zero at the model initial time and then accumulates over time. Regarding melting, this variable is handled differently in various surface physics schemes. For whichever surface scheme you're using, you can take a look at specific code in the WRF/phys/module_sf_<scheme>.F file (for e.g., if you're using Noah, look in module_sf_noahdrv.F). Another option would be the SNOWH variable, which is the physical snow depth. You would need to subtract the depth at the previous hour so determine the hourly rate.

I did a search in my wrfout files and saw that ACSNOW is not located but ACSNOWLSM is. Are they the same?

 

[kwerner]

It looks like ACSNOWLSM may be the variable used specifically by the NoahMP LSM, and in registry.noahmp, it is defined as "Accumulated frozen precipitation into LSM."