Understanding surface files in ELM

A surface file is the data input that provides ELM with a description of the land surface required for our simulations. They are stored in a multi-dimensional file type referred to as a NetCDF. These NetCDF files can describe our regions of interest by representing the land surface in smaller chunks called grid cells. These files can represent each grid cell in the area we are modeling with many surface characteristics (often 80+ variables) across a range of plant functional type, soil levels, and much more.

There are many ways we can intuitively modify variables within a surface file to answer different science questions in our modeling. For example, if we wanted to understand the impact of shrubification in the Arctic, we could modify the percentage of the landscape represented by shrubs on the surface file and compare with our current baseline.