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Manual Soil Moisture for Nested Domain

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mcs2021

New member
Hello,

I am very new to WRF and am looking for some general guidance concerning the soil moisture input in WPS during a nested run.

Considering a configuration of a parent domain and one nested/smaller domain, I would like to manually set the surface soil moisture values of the entire nested domain to certain values (think idealized patterns or constant values) at the initial time step, rather than using real-data as the initial condition. I am not expecting this initial condition to be static throughout the run (i.e. I expect the soil moisture pattern to change with the onset of any precipitation).

As of now, I see that surface soil moisture can be accessed through the met_em files (variable SM000010) and it also appears in the wrfinput data files (variable SMOIS). However, with a two-way nested run, it seems that the nested domain uses information from the parent domain in its boundary conditions. I am confused as to whether I need to change both the parent domain and the nested domain inputs because of this. I also am unsure of which of these files (met_em or wrfinput) to edit for this configuration to work.

I might also be missing or misinterpreting information, as I have only perused the wrf and wps documentation for a short period of time. Any advice on how to setup these experiments would be appreciated!
 
Hi,
It doesn't look like soil moisture is a field that's included in the wrf boundary file, so I don't think you'll need to worry about the boundary conditions. As for making modifications to the inner domain, take a look at this FAQ that discusses that, and let me know if you have additional questions.
 
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