Preparing the Cabauw data for the ORCHIDEE scheme


This pages describes how the Cabauw data set was prepared from the original data made available by the The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and prepared by Anton Beljaars and Fred Bosveld (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, p.o. box 201, 3730 AE De Bilt, The Netherlands, email: beljaars@knmi.nl; bosveld@knmi.nl).

You need to download this file . Then you compile and execute the included code. The file contains all the data (Release 2 version 3 of the data) and code you need to generate a forcing file which will also contains the availabe validation data. This code can serve as an example for transforming other data sets.

You can also access directly a compressed version of the forcing file in netCDF here . I follows the ALMA convention and should be easy to use.

If you use this data you should acknowledge the authors and refer to the following publications. You will find more details in the documentation data which is available.
Beljaars, A.C.M. and Viterbo, P. (1994): The sensitivity of winter evaporation to the formulation of aerodynamic resistance in the ECMWF model, Bound.-Layer Meteor., 71, 135-149.
Beljaars, A.C.M. and F.C Bosveld (1995): Cabauw data for the validation of land surface parametrization schemes, (submitted to Journal of Climate)

Configuring ORCHIDEE for the Cabauw data

The important information for configuring the model (create a run.def file) is that the atmospheric data is provided at the 20 m level. The vegetation at this site is grassland and the following values were recommended by PILPS :
A sample run.def file is available.

Jan Polcher
Last modified: Tue Jun 12 09:11:10 CEST 2001