Should classic driver also require explicit bare soil tiles?

[tbohn]

Just wondering if this is desirable, for consistency with image drivers. Note that land cover classifications generally contain an explicit bare soil class, and we can easily add a bare soil class to our veg library (I'm doing so for my current project already).

Downsides to this would be that older, widely used datasets would need to be updated.

But perhaps tonic could handle that conversion. Default bare soil characteristics could be stored in a config file for tonic.

Still, users of older datasets would have to convert those datasets themselves, since I'm guessing there's little desire or space to host newer versions of the datasets.

Any thoughts?

[jhamman]

I'm 50/50 on this. As long as we provide a conversion tool, I like the idea of cleaning up the VIC parameter files in the classic driver. However, since I don't have plans to use the classic driver, I'm not all that motivated to make this change. Maybe others have stronger opinions?

[bartnijssen]

Same - I think specifying it explicitly is more obvious. It would be good if someone who uses the classic version to add the conversion capability. Maybe change the issue title to (or open a new issue):

Require explicit bare soil tile in classic driver

and then have a dependent issue

Create soil conversion utility in tonic for to update the soil file for VIC classic

Then mark as enhancement

[tbohn]

Just FYI - tonic currently reads in the classic parameters and adds an explicit bare soil tile if one doesn't exist (also adds an explicit bare soil class to the list of available classes if one is not present in the library). So all that is needed is the ability for tonic to convert the netcdf parameters to a set of new 5.0-compliant ascii parameter files

[jhamman]

Okay, so lets do this. Let's also keep this as a fairly low priority and try to find someone other than @tbohn and I to do this :wink: