Land working group, meeting notes 2025

Land Surface Working Group
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7

Date: 15th April 2025
Attendees: 8

1. Land Working Group Workshop

  • Update by Lachlan Whyborn:
    • Alex Norton added to the workshop committee to represent CSIRO’s interests.
    • Lachlan enquired about a theme and proposed “High resolution and Australia-specific ancillaries for land surface modeling.” based on last year’s workshop.
      • It might be best to broaden it to include processes.
    • We also need more clarity on the plans for the workshop: presentations, hackathon, discussions?
    • Claire emphasised we need to finalise a short description for registration purposes by May 5th.
  • Action Items:
    • Lachan to post on the Forum to gather feedback and initiate discussion.

2. Mailing List Transition

  • Update by Claire Carouge:
    • Information about changing the mailing list to the Forum has been sent.
    • Encouraged everyone to join the new mailing list.
    • There is already a good uptake. Plan to disable the old mailing list by the end of the week.
  • Action Items:
    • Contact Claire if anyone has trouble joining the new mailing list.

3. Ancillary Suite for Cable

  • Presentation by Lachlan Whyborn and Mathew Lipson:
    • Goals:
      • Develop an ancillary suite generator for both Jules and Cable at arbitrary resolutions.
      • Facilitate model intercomparisons and high-resolution ancillaries.
    • Current Status:
      • Spreadsheet detailing required ancillaries for Jules and Cable.
      • Mapping matrix between CCI land cover types and Cable land cover types created by Mathew Lipson.
      • First set of vegetation maps for CABLE have been produced at various resolutions using a first guess for the mapping.
      • Discussion of dominant vs per PFT land fractions and LAI. It was decided we need to support all the cases. There is still the question whether the option to choose the number of vegetation patches per grid cell should happen in the ancillary suite or in CABLE. Differences between Jules and Cable ancillaries, such as land cover fractions, LAI, and soil thermal capacity.
      • Question about using soil thermal capacity or the specific heat capacity and the soil density. Ian notes CABLE is always using the specific heat capacity and soil density together to create the soil thermal capacity. There is just one exception in the code that is for a very specific case which we might be able to remove. It might be ok for the moment to store the soil thermal capacity in the specific heat capacity and change the soil density to 1.
      • Input from the community is needed to create a mapping matrix between CCI and Cable.
        • Ian says a first step would be to compare the CCI-based maps currently produced with the maps used by CABLE in existing gridinfo file or ancillary file for ACCESS.
        • It was noted CABLE and JULES do not process sparse vegetation in the same way. JULES tends to add more bare soil than is needed for CABLE.
    • Action Items:
      • Lachlan to create maps for visual comparison.
      • Further discussion on the mapping matrix and handling of fractional vs. dominant vegetation types.

4. Moving the CABLE repository

There was no time to discuss this topic.

Action Item: Claire will send more information via the mailing list.

5. Project Allocation Usage

  • Update by Claire Carouge:
    • Access NRI has used 40% of its allocation for the quarter.
    • Discussion on future usage of the WG project allocation.
      • The main user recently has been Jhan.
      • No participant has plan for significant usage.
  • Action Items:
    • Claire to discuss with Jhan about his plans.

Next Meeting: 6th May 2025