Setting up FATES at a New Site

To set up FATES at a new site there are three things we need to change.

  1. The surface and domain files

  2. The climate forcing data

  3. The parameter file (optional)

We have already make surface files, domain files and climate forcing data for you and you will find them in your container under the inputdata directory. We provide the scripts needed to make these files and describe them below but you don’t need to run them during the tutorial.

FATES will run with the same default tropical PFT parameeter file that we used in lesson 2. We can start using this parameeter file at the new sites, and then in lesson 5 we will modifty the parameter file.

Making custom surface and domain files

ELM-FATES is a global model and can be run anywhere on land. If we have data on the environment at a site we can use it to customize the set up, if not, we can use global datasets and subset them to the location of interest.

In the tools directory there is a jupyter notebook Make_surface_domain_files.ipynb that takes global surface and domain files and extracts the grid cell that contains the site where we want to run FATES. This script can be used to generate surface and domain files for anywhere on land by changing the lat and lon variables at the top of the file. If we have detailed soils data we could use that to update the surface file, but for now we will use the default values from the global surface file which are from soils grid.

Making custom climate forcing data

If there are detailed climate data from nearby weather stations then it is possible to generate site-specific met drivers. At a minimum FATES needs 6-hourly data on temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, humidity and windspeed. If these data don’t exist we can extract data from global climate data. In the tools directory is the jupyter notebook Make_met_drivers.ipynb which takes global reanalysis data from GSWP3 and extracts data for the grid cell where the site is located. Again, you do not need to run this script during the tutorial as all the data is already extracted and located in the inputdata directory.

Modifying the create script

To get FATES to use these new files we need to point to them in the create script. We can do this by changing the ‘Site’ argument at the top of the script.