1. Executive Summary
Permafrost, continuous or discontinuous, dominates over 50 % of Canada’s landscape (Wolfe, 1998). The permafrost therefore plays a big role in the hydrology of the Canada’s northern region. However, this permafrost is degrading and it has become a critical issue in terms of its positive feedback to the climate warming (Paqquin and Sushama 2014). With the current urgency for better understanding the science behind the degradation of permafrost and permafrost degradation having a strong link with soil moisture and soil temperature, it is crucial to simulate the soil moisture and soil temperature for regions where permafrost exists (Guan et al., 2010).
In this project, the ability of CLASSIC (The Canadian Land Surface Scheme including biogeochemical Cycles) to simulate soil moisture and soil temperature was tested (Figure 1). The CLASSIC model is the coupling of the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS) and the Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (CTEM). Since the model CLASSIC is relatively new to most of the modelers, running it was a challenge. The challenges included the unknown knowledge of how the back end of the model worked and the complexity of netcdf formatted files among others. By the end of this project, however, most of these challenges were overcome.
After multiple runs, the model ran and outputs were generated. However, the values of these outputs were ‘NA’ which means error(s) was (were) made while running the model. This error is still not known and therefore efforts are still required to make the model run that would generate real time outputs.
It was found that the support to work on CLASSIC is less as compared to models like MESH. This could be because of CLASSIC being a relatively new package and unfamiliarity of the model structure among the experienced modelers situated in the National Hydrology Research Centre (NHRC) building, Saskatoon – the place where this project was being performed.
Figure 1: Conceptual diagram of the study of this project