NOAA-OWP / ngen

Next Generation Water Modeling Engine and Framework Prototype
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Units of Outputs Unknown #789

Open jawad-UA opened 5 months ago

jawad-UA commented 5 months ago

When I run model I get cat-###.csv and nex-###_output.csv files for different catchments. But I could not understand what are the units of the output like ET, Potential_ET, Qout etc. I tried assuming them m/hr but that does not seem to be the right guess. Can anyone here please let me know about the units please.

hellkite500 commented 5 months ago

At present, the values in the catch-###.csv files come from the model formulation running for that catchment. You can see some additional info on output variables for some details. The units of these variables are dictated by the formulation, and the model engine doesn't (currently) do any inspection of the units for output. The best option currently is to look at the formulation documentation and see what each BMI variable it advertises as an output variable has for units. We may, in the future, use some BMI functionality to try to attach those units to output automatically, but that is difficult to do with the CSV output we currently produce, #744 may help to start addressing that.

As for the nex-###.csv outputs, these are the accumulated overland flow contributions at the point from all directly connected catchments assoicated with the nexus. These values should be in units of m^3/s given that a formulation's main_output_variable returns a rate, e.g. m/s, the main_output_variable is currently automatically multiplied by the catchment's area to produce the volumetric flow rate.