River Runoff

Description of River Input

River Input

First you need to set the appropriate CPP options. Typically, this would be:

• TS_PSOURCE: for salinity and/or temperature sources/sinks

and/or

• UV_PSOURCE: for mass sources/sinks due to river runoff.

Then you need to decide how to provide the information of river flow, vertical distribution of flow, direction, location, and tracer (temp, salt, sed, etc) values. You can provide the data analytically or by providing the data in a NetCDF forcing file.

To provide this information analytically, you need to activate ANA_PSOURCE and set the following values in ana_psource.h:

Nsrc  ! Number of sources.

Dsrc(Nsrc)  ! direction. (0 for along xi-axis, 1 for eta-axis).

Isrc(Nsrc)  ! location of i index (u or v point)
Jsrc(Nsrc)  ! location of j index (u or v point)

Lsrc(Nsrc,itemp)  ! T or F if temp information will be provided. If not, then the model
uses the value at the inflowing rho point.
Lsrc(Nsrc,isalt)  ! T or F if salt information will be provided. If not, then the model
uses the value at the inflowing rho point.
Lsrc(Nsrc,ised)  ! T or F if sediment information will be provided. If not, then the
model uses the value at the inflowing rho point.

Qshape(Nsrc,N)  ! vertical distribution of the flow.

Qbar(Nsrc)  ! depth-integrated mass flow.

Tsrc(Nsrc,N,itemp)  ! actual vertical distribution of the temperature values.
Tsrc(Nsrc,N,isalt)  ! actual vertical distribution of the salinity values.
Tsrc(Nsrc,N,ised)  ! actual vertical distribution of the sediment values.

To provide this information in a NetCDF file, do NOT define the ANA_PSOURCE. Instead, create the NetCDF file and add the file name to FRCNAME in ocean.in.

You can find examples on how to write such a river forcing file with the "matlab" package here. You may also be interested in this forum post.

Here are some forum discussions about the vertical profile of the flow.

1. Treatment of rivers
2. More on rivers, ROMS2.0 to 2.1?