CH-Earth / summa

Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling Alternatives:
http://www.ral.ucar.edu/projects/summa
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Too much snow compaction causes errors #363

Closed arbennett closed 4 years ago

arbennett commented 4 years ago

There are two sub-issues that arise from a rare case when too much snow compaction occurs:

  1. subsequent calculations of volumetric fractions of ice + liquid end up greater than 1
  2. subsequent calculations of layer density can be too small
bartnijssen commented 4 years ago

@arbennett: What do you mean with the second point? I don't quite understand what it means that the density is too small ...

arbennett commented 4 years ago

There is a check in the snow compaction routine which ensures that layer densities are above 40 kg/m^3. This tends to happen when the layers are very small (depths below ~0.1mm) after compaction and after corrections ensuring that volumetric fractions add up to 1.

Of course, at such small depths SUMMA should perform a layer merge, but the layer merge code happens before the compaction code, so this error can still happen in the code's current form.

arbennett commented 4 years ago

This was solved via #364