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Output Files

Grid Specification

All output files are on the same North American 1 km grid as the Blender input files (see Directory Structure). Each file has dimensions:

x = 11700
y = 4200
ti = 365 or 366

The ti dimension is daily and spans one water year, from October 1 through September 30. Leap-year water years contain 366 daily timesteps.

Primary Outputs

The two science outputs are SWE.nc and Precip.nc:

File Description Approximate Size
SWE.nc Daily snow water equivalent [m] ~16 GB
Precip.nc Daily precipitation water-equivalent rate [m day-1] ~27 GB

These are written to:

/discover/nobackup/projects/coressd/Blender/Runs/WYxxxx/outputs/

Expected NetCDF Metadata

The publication files should carry the following science-variable metadata:

File Variable Units Long name
SWE.nc SWE m snow water equivalent
Precip.nc Precip m day-1 daily precipitation water-equivalent rate

The same units and long_name attributes are also written as global attributes in each file. The science variables should not retain copied standard_name, vmin, or vmax attributes from template/input files.

The maintained metadata repair helper is:

/discover/nobackup/projects/coressd/csd_scripts/metadata/fix_output_netcdf_metadata.sh

Run it after the final yearly output files have been merged. The helper uses ncatted, attempts to load nco/5.1.7 on Discover if needed, and writes before/after header snapshots to Analysis/metadata_headers/.

Other Output Files

The remaining files in the outputs/ directory (G.nc, Gmelt.nc, Gpv.nc, Gmeltpv.nc, SWEpv.nc, Upv.nc, Us.nc) are either placeholders or non-functional outputs carried over from the original Blender manuscript. These should be removed in a future cleanup of the pipeline.

Note: Gmelt.nc is the same size as Precip.nc (~27 GB) because it was used as a duplicate write target during testing and was never disabled. It does not contain meaningful output.