The Surface Gridded Component

The SURFACE component handles the transformations from atmospheric grid to exchange grid. All of its imports are on the atmospheric grid, but its exports can be on either grid. Its children, LAND, LANDICE, LAKE, SALTWATER, are responsible for surface calculations at each of the four GEOS-5 surface types. The four children live on their subset of the exchange grid and SURFACE satisfies all of their imports and regrids their exports when required.

The surface component interacts tightly with the TURBULENCE component, in doing their semi-implicit time stepping. Their execution is thus fairly specialized. They each have two run methods which must be called by the parent (COLUMN PHYSICS) in a specified order. The first method of SURFACE calls the first run method of each child to compute the exchange coefficients between the surface and the first atmospheric layer. These are used by TURBULENCE in its first run method. The second run method of surface uses turbulent fluxes and their derivatives with respect to surface values computed by TURBULENCE to have its childrens' second methods update their skin state variables (i.e., temperature, humidity, etc).

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