Community Land Model Version 3.0 (CLM3.0) Developer's Guide

This document describes the guidelines adopted for software development of the Community Land Model (CLM) and serves as a reference to the entire code base of the released version of the model. The version of the code described here is Version 3.0 which was released in the summer of 2004. This document, the Community Land Model Version 3.0 (CLM3.0) User's Guide (Vertenstein et al., 2004), the Technical Description of the Community Land Model (CLM) (Oleson et al., 2004), and the Community Land Model's Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (CLM-DGVM): Technical Description and User's Guide (Levis et al., 2004) provide the developer, user, or researcher with details of implementation, instructions for using the model, a scientific description of the model, and a scientific description of the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model integrated with CLM respectively. The CLM is a single column (snow-soil-vegetation) biogeophysical model of the land surface which can be run serially (on a laptop or personal computer) or in parallel (using distributed or shared memory processors or both) on both vector and scalar computer architectures. Written in Fortran 90, CLM can be run offline (i.e., run in isolation using stored atmospheric forcing data), coupled to an atmospheric model (e.g., the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM)), or coupled to a climate system model (e.g., the Community Climate System Model Version 3 (CCSM3)) through a flux coupler (e.g., Coupler 6 (CPL6)). When coupled, CLM exchanges fluxes of energy, water, and momentum with the atmosphere. The horizontal land surface heterogeneity is represented by a nested subgrid hierarchy composed of gridcells, landunits, columns, and plant functional types (PFTs). This hierarchical representation is reflected in the data structures used by the model code. Biophysical processes are simulated for each subgrid unit (landunit, column, and PFT) independently, and prognostic variables are maintained for each subgrid unit. Vertical heterogeneity is represented by a single vegetation layer, 10 layers for soil, and up to five layers for snow, depending on the snow depth. For computational efficiency, gridcells are grouped into ''clumps'' which are divided in cyclic fashion among distributed memory processors. Additional parallel performance is obtained by distributing clumps of gridcells across shared memory processors on computer platforms that support hybrid Message Passing Interface (MPI)/OpenMP operation. Significant modifications to the source code have been made over the last year to support efficient operation on newer vector architectures, specifically the Earth Simulator in Japan and the Cray X1 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Homan et al., 2004). These code modifications resulted in performance improvements even on the scalar architectures widely used for running CLM presently. To better support vectorized processing in the code, subgrid units (columns and PFTs) are grouped into ''filters'' based on their process-specific categorization. For example, filters (vectors of integers) referring to all snow, non-snow, lake, non-lake, and soil covered columns and PFTs within each clump are built and maintained when the model is run. Many loops within the scientific subroutines use these filters to indirectly address the process-appropriate subgrid units.