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CableUserGuide_Introduction
CABLE is a community land-surface model. Users of CABLE are encouraged to actively participate as members of this community. It is the community of users and developers that will guide the future direction of CABLE.
Like most land surface models (LSMs), CABLE simulates the exchanges of radiation, moisture, heat and carbon at the land surface. It is provided with meteorological conditions (its inputs) and, based on these inputs, predicts fluxes (its outputs, e.g. latent heat flux, upward long-wave radiation, net ecosystem exchange of CO2, runoff or drainage through deep soil). The characteristics of the soil and vegetation in the regions it simulates are generally constant throughout the simulation, and described are by CABLE's parameters. Variables which CABLE stores in memory from one time step to the next, known as model states, include soil moisture content, soil and vegetation temperatures, and carbon stored in the vegetation and soil. An abstract schematic representation of these model components is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: A schematic representation of a model, with real number inputs, outputs, states and time- independent parameters
CABLE can be used as a single component of a larger global climate model (GCM). In this situation, CABLE receives meteorological data from, and passes flux information to, the boundary layer of an atmospheric model. When coupled to such a model, CABLE is said to be running ' online'. Alternatively, meteorological data from observational sites or saved from an atmospheric model can be used to force CABLE and its output simply saved to file, in which case it is operating ' offline'.
Although various versions of CABLE have been successfully hosted by a number of GCMs, the previous release of CABLE was for offline applications only. This release of CABLE-2.0 supports both offline CABLE and one online application. The supported online model is the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS). The atmospheric component of ACCESS is the UK Met Office Unified Model (UM). In the implementation described here, CABLE replaces the Met Office Surface Exchange Scheme (MOSES). In Sections 3 and 4 respectively, we describe in detail the offline and online implementations of CABLE. It is anticipated that future CABLE releases will support CABLE coupled to additional climate models.
