NLDAS Forcing in pecan

[ankurdesai]

Hourly met forcing from 1979 to present (2014 and ongoing in near realtime) with bias correction (for radiation and precipitation) and terrain correction (for all) based on NARR at 1/8 degree resolution over North America, except precipitation which is based on CPC gauge interpolation using terrain adjusted PRISM climatology- might be the ideal forcing for PECAN. It's used in NLDAS to produce estimates of soil moisture, ET, and other hydrology across N America.

http://ldas.gsfc.nasa.gov/nldas/NLDAS2forcing.php

In GRIB2 format, but accessible through NASA's web services for data:

http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/hydrology/data-holdings

There is a global 1/4 degree 3hourly version as well (GLDAS).

We should use these in pecan as an option for forcing, especially in cases where moisture budget matters.

[crollinson]

so this gets into the Pecan documentation, I have a working download script for NLDAS. Tweaking it for GLDAS should be very, very simple.

There are definitely some clunky bits of code, mostly in the parsing of the ascii file and the querying of lat/lon every time is probably unnecessary but was done as a safe-guard against any random errors in the files.

Current clock time from my internet connection at home was roughly 7 seconds per day, so it'll take a while (~1 hr) to download all the available data for a given site.

[mdietze]

PR #874 adds download functions, but these still need to be integrated with met.process and the web code and tested

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is stale because it has been open 365 days with no activity.

[infotroph]

is there more to do on NLDAS forcing, or can this issue be closed?

[mdietze]

@infotroph it would be good to check if it is fully integrated with met.process and able to successfully work from the web page. I've never tried using it in practice, as my lab has largely switched over to ensemble-based reanalysis products, but for folks working with a single met ensemble NLDAS does have a higher spatial resolution than other reanalysis products, so would be good to dupport.