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METSIM: Meteorology Simulator

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MetSim is a meteorological simulator and forcing disaggregator for hydrologic modeling and climate applications. Metsim is based on MtClim and the preprocessor from version 4 of the VIC hydrologic model.

MetSim consists of 3 main modules that govern the operation of 3 major aspects of its operation:

1. Management of dataset preprocessing and IO

The MetSim object provides high level support for setting up jobs and infrastructure for running simulation/disaggregation steps. It is the main interface through which the other modules are accessed.

2. Simulation of meteorological forcings

The base implementation of the meteorological simulator is based off of the algorithms described in1. This component has been designed to be flexible in allowing for alternative implementations which may be specified during the setup of the MetSim object. The default implementation allows for the daily simulation of:

  • Mean daily temperature
  • Snow Water Equivalent (SWE)
  • Incoming shortwave radiation
  • Cloud cover fraction
  • Potential evapotranspiration
  • Vapor pressure

3. Disaggregation of daily simulation values to sub-daily timesteps

Daily data from given input or simulated via the forcings generation component of MetSim can be disaggregated down to sub-daily values at intervals specified in minutes (provided they divide evenly into 24 hours). The operation of these algorithms is also described in1.

Depending on the setup of these various components MetSim can be used for different purposes. For examples on how you can use MetSim see the examples page in the documentation.

Getting Started

Installation

MetSim itself is a pure Python package, but its dependencies are not. You should ensure that you have all of the required dependencies:

Then, install MetSim with pip:

$ pip install metsim

To run the test suite after installing MetSim, install py.test (pip install pytest) and run py.test --verbose.

Finally, you can install MetSim directly from the source if you desire to:

$ git clone https://github.com/UW-Hydro/MetSim.git
$ cd MetSim
$ python setup.py install
$ py.test --verbose

Basic Usage

MetSim provides a simple command line interface which is primarily operated via configuration files. For more information about the options available to be set in the configuration files see the configuration page in the full documentation.

Once installed, MetSim can be used from the command line via:

ms /path/to/configuration [-v] [-n #]

Bracketed flags are optional; -v activates verbose mode to print messages about the status of a run, and -n activates parallelism. The number given after the -n flag is the number of processes to run. A good rule of thumb is to use one less process than the number of processsors (or threads) that the machine you are running on has.

References

Footnotes

  1. Bohn, T. J., B. Livneh, J. W. Oyler, S. W. Running, B. Nijssen, and D. P. Lettenmaier, 2013a: Global evaluation of MTCLIM and related algorithms for forcing of ecological and hydrological models, Agr. Forest. Meteorol., 176, 38-49, doi:10.1016/j.agrformet.2013.03.003. ↩ ↩2